A rath, as this type of monument is more precisely called, is a ringfort constructed from raised earthworks rather than stone; it would originally have enclosed a farmstead, the home of a single family or extended household during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Tens of thousands of them survive across Ireland, yet each one occupies a particular patch of ground chosen deliberately, for drainage, for visibility, for proximity to water or tillage land, and that particularity is what makes any individual example worth pausing over.