The earthen bank that traces its circumference is only about twenty-five metres across, heavily overgrown now, and easy to dismiss as a natural rise in the land unless you know what you are looking for.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a type of ringfort built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Ringforts were the standard farmstead of Gaelic Ireland, home to a family and their livestock, enclosed by one or more circular earthen banks, called raths when built from earth and cashels when built from stone. They are among the most common archaeological monuments in the country, with tens of thousands recorded, yet their very familiarity has made them easy to overlook. This particular example at Poundlick is a single-banked enclosure, the most modest category, suggesting the household it once protected occupied a fairly ordinary position in the early medieval social order. The flat pastureland surrounding it would have suited small-scale farming well, and the site has likely retained its agricultural surroundings in an almost unbroken line from that period to the present day.