It is easy to walk past such things without a second thought, mistaking the gentle rise for a natural feature of the landscape, but the near-circular outline, roughly 22 metres across at its widest, marks it out as something deliberate and very old.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the island, though many are as worn as this one. The enclosing bank here, built from earth and stone, stands less than a metre high in places and has eroded considerably over time. Large boulders are still visible along the north-eastern stretch of the bank, partly swallowed by grass and grazing land. A modern field fence cuts across the southern portion, truncating what would once have been a continuous boundary. Inside, the ground sits slightly proud of the surrounding fields to the west and north, a subtle but telling sign of earlier occupation, and the surface is crossed by cultivation ridges running on a north-east to south-west axis, suggesting the interior was turned over to agriculture at some point after the ringfort fell out of use as a settlement.