It is the kind of place that rewards a second look: a ringfort, or rath, built at a height that suggests its builders were as interested in visibility as in enclosure.

Ringforts are among the most common early medieval monuments in Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries, and were used as enclosed farmsteads by free farming families. This example at Tievemore measures around twenty metres in internal diameter, with an overall external diameter of approximately thirty metres. It is defined by a bank of earth and stone that reaches two metres in height at its highest point on the south-western side and two metres wide at the top, with traces of a fosse, a defensive ditch, also surviving to the south-west. The combination of bank and fosse is a typical arrangement for ringforts of this type, the dug material having been piled inward to create the raised boundary. The monument was identified and brought to wider attention by Helen Riekstiņš.