The rath at Reaghan in County Galway offers something more oblique. What survives here is barely a suggestion of its former shape, a subcircular enclosure measuring roughly 31 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, its defining bank so worn down over the centuries that it now reads as little more than a degraded scarp in the grass. The external fosse, a defensive ditch that would originally have ringed the outside of the enclosure, is still traceable along the southern and western arc through to the north-west, but only just. The whole thing sits on a gentle rise in rolling grassland, which may be why it has survived at all, even in this reduced form.

Raths of this kind were the standard rural settlement unit of early medieval Ireland, home to a farming family of modest means, enclosed for the protection of livestock and household alike. They were not forts in any military sense, more secure farmsteads whose earthen banks and ditches kept out wolves and opportunist raiders rather than armies. What makes Reaghan quietly interesting is the association with a possible souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that was often built within or beneath a rath to serve as a place of refuge, storage, or both. The souterrain has its own separate record, and its relationship to the surface enclosure remains tentative rather than confirmed, but the pairing is a familiar one across the Irish archaeological landscape.