Look more carefully and the geometry becomes clear: a near-perfect circle, thirty metres across in both directions, lifted slightly above the surrounding field and traced by an earthen bank that still stands around half a metre high. On the southern to north-western arc, a shallow fosse, or external ditch, runs alongside the bank, dug to roughly thirty centimetres in depth. On the eastern side, a causeway crosses that fosse and leads to an entrance gap just over two metres wide, the original threshold of the enclosure.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they are earthen rather than stone-built, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Most were single farmsteads, the bank and fosse serving less as military defences than as boundaries marking a household's territory and keeping livestock secure. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, but their sheer number has never quite diminished the strangeness of encountering one in a field, its circular logic still legible after more than a thousand years. This example near Togher was recorded in a 1994 archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe district, which takes in the landscapes around Lough Mask and Lough Carra, a region whose low drumlin hills and waterlogged margins were settled intensively during the early medieval period.