The earthwork at Tonagh in County Westmeath does neither. It sits in wet, poorly drained land, its surrounding fosse perpetually waterlogged, its interior marshy, a spring feeding quietly into the ditch from the south. That basic fact, the deliberate or at least accepted placement of a monument in sodden ground, is what makes the site worth pausing over.

The earthwork survives as a roughly circular area approximately 25 metres across on its north-west to south-east axis, enclosed by what remains of an earthen bank. That bank has been largely worn down to a scarp, and survives in its best condition between the east-north-east and the south. Elsewhere it has effectively disappeared into the surrounding ground. The shallow external fosse, which would once have defined the outer edge of the enclosure, is now waterlogged and wide. When the Ordnance Survey first mapped the area in 1838, they recorded something slightly different: an oval-shaped mound enclosed by a fosse, which reads more like a burial mound, or barrow, than the classic rath of an early medieval farmstead. Later editions of the same maps show only the fosse, the mound itself no longer distinguishable. That progressive erasure from the cartographic record hints at how much has been lost at ground level over the intervening centuries. The combination of factors, the wet terrain, the oval mounded form recorded in 1838, and the general oddness of the location for a settled enclosure, has led to the suggestion that this may originally have been a large barrow rather than a ringfort at all. A barrow is a prehistoric burial mound, typically earthen, and the distinction matters: it would push the monument's origins back well before the early medieval period and change entirely what it was built for.