The classic rath, that most common of Irish early medieval enclosures, typically presents a clear earthen bank and a surrounding ditch, the fosse, which together once defined a farmstead or chieftain's compound. The example at Toberawnaun, in the coastal hill country of County Sligo, does almost none of this. Its enclosing bank of earth and stone barely clears the interior ground level, rising somewhere between ten centimetres and just under a metre for most of its circuit, and there is no fosse at all. The result is a raised circular platform, roughly 25 metres across, that sits on a low hillock in hilly pasture without making much of a case for itself.

The form, once you know to look for it, is still legible: a circular area just over 25 metres in diameter, enclosed by a bank roughly 4.7 metres wide, the whole thing describing the ghost of a settlement that was probably occupied during the early medieval period, the centuries between roughly 500 and 1000 AD when ringforts were the dominant settlement type across Ireland. What has been lost here is more than the usual weathering would account for. The original entrance, which in better-preserved examples can often be identified as a gap or a causeway across the fosse, is no longer recognisable. Whether the bank was always this low, or whether centuries of agricultural use have spread and flattened it, the site as it survives is a quietly eroded thing, its outlines present but muted.