At Meadstown in County Cork, a circular platform roughly 32.5 metres across sits on a west-facing slope above the Owenboy river valley, the remnant of a rath, the earthen-banked enclosure that once served as a farmstead or small defended settlement during the early medieval period in Ireland. Ploughing has done its work over the centuries, and what survives is modest: an interior bank standing no more than 0.4 metres above the enclosed ground, and an exterior face rising to perhaps 1.6 metres at its highest. Faint traces of a fosse, the outer ditch that would originally have reinforced the bank, can still be read along the eastern and western sides.