The one at Kilcarrooraun in County Galway has fared considerably better, sitting well-preserved on a south-facing slope with its essential shape still legible in the landscape.

A rath is a ringfort defined by an earthen bank rather than stone walling, typically dating to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when such enclosures served as the fortified farmsteads of farming families. This example is a neat circle of around 25 metres in diameter, formed by a bank of earth and stone and accompanied by an external fosse, which is a defensive ditch dug around the outside of the bank to reinforce the enclosure. The combination of bank and fosse would have made the interior a reasonably secure space for a household and its livestock. One detail betrays the passage of time: a field boundary has been laid directly over the bank on its south-eastern side, the kind of quiet encroachment that centuries of agricultural reworking tend to leave behind. The rath sits in pastureland on the slope of a ridge, which would have given its original occupants good visibility across the surrounding ground, a consideration that likely influenced where it was sited in the first place.