At Knockevagh in County Carlow, a ringfort, the type known in Irish as a rath, survives today as little more than a slight depression in the ground, ringed by the faintest suggestion of an earthen bank. A rath is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, most commonly as a defended farmstead for a family of some social standing.

The 1839 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a circular area of around thirty metres in diameter, enclosed by a bank. That survey, the first large-scale systematic mapping of Ireland, captured many earthworks that were already degraded by the time cartographers reached them, and the Knockevagh rath was among them. Today the physical remains have receded further still, to a dip in the ground and faint bank traces, the kind of feature that the eye passes over without registering unless you already know what to look for.