Look more carefully and the circular logic of the earthwork becomes apparent: a rath, an Early Medieval enclosed settlement of the kind once scattered across Ireland in the tens of thousands, sitting quietly on a small hillock with trees growing both around its edge and within the space it once enclosed.

A rath is essentially a circular bank of earth, sometimes accompanied by a ditch, thrown up around a farmstead or high-status dwelling during the Early Medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. This one measures twenty-nine metres in diameter, which places it at the smaller end of the scale. The enclosing bank is largely intact, though from the south-east to the south-west the bank gives way to a natural or modified scarp, where the slope of the hillock itself does the work of defining the boundary. A field boundary has been laid directly over part of the bank at some point in the intervening centuries, the kind of incremental agricultural overwriting that has altered or destroyed many similar sites across Connacht. The planting of trees around the perimeter and inside the interior is a more recent intervention, one that gives the monument a distinctive silhouette but also signals that somebody, at some point, thought it worth marking out and preserving.