This one in Pigeonstown, on the southern fringes of County Offaly, asks more of you. What survives is a low, flat-topped mound, irregular in outline, rising no more than 1.75 metres at its highest point and stretching roughly 29.5 metres across its north-south axis. It is, in other words, a subtle thing, the kind of feature that reads as a slight swelling in a field until you know what you are looking at.

This was once a ringfort, or rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement in Ireland. Raths were typically enclosed farmsteads, their circular boundaries formed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, enclosing a dwelling and associated structures. They were built and occupied across a broad stretch of Irish history, roughly from the early centuries of the first millennium through to the Norman period. The one at Pigeonstown has not survived well enough to show that structure clearly. By the time cartographers recorded it on the 1912 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, it was already reduced to something hachured as a small circular enclosure, the mapmakers' shorthand for a feature that was present but already low and indistinct. The site sits in the foothills approaching the Slieve Bloom mountains to the south, a quietly upland fringe that would have offered early farmers a degree of shelter and proximity to higher grazing ground.