The example at Rinagry in County Mayo is one of these, a rath, which is the Irish term for a ringfort defined by an earthen bank and ditch rather than stone, that sits quietly in the landscape with relatively little on record to explain it.

Ringforts were typically built and occupied during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or small community. The surrounding bank and ditch offered a degree of protection for livestock as much as for people, and the interior would have contained a dwelling house alongside outbuildings and storage pits. Raths of this kind were the basic unit of rural life for much of early Christian Ireland, and the people who lived within them were not warriors or nobility as a rule, but farmers working land that in many parts of Connacht was already ancient by the time the first sod was cut for the enclosing bank. Mayo itself is dense with such monuments, a reflection of how intensively this part of the west was settled across many centuries.