They are easy to miss, and that is part of what makes this rath in Treanboy worth paying attention to. Most ringforts, the circular earthen enclosures built by early medieval farming families across Ireland, read as a single coherent shape from the outside. This one holds an interior puzzle: two distinct arcs of raised ground sitting near the centre of the enclosure, their purpose unrecorded, their origins unresolved.

A rath is a ringfort defined by earthen banks rather than stone, typically used as a farmstead and place of enclosure during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Treanboy example is a reasonably substantial one. Its circular interior measures approximately 47 metres north to south and 45.2 metres east to west, bounded by a scarped edge, an earthen bank rising about a metre above the interior, and an external fosse, which is simply a ditch, roughly half a metre deep and nearly six metres wide. Between the main bank and the outer ditch there is an intermediary space of around six metres. A gap of about 1.3 metres in the bank at the south-southwest likely marks the original entrance. The field drain that now runs along the south-western to north-western line of the outer fosse follows what may be a very old boundary, eventually meeting the Ehernagh Stream around fifteen metres to the north-west. The site was recorded and compiled by Denis Power, with the notes uploaded in August 2011 and an aerial photograph taken by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland in October 2002.

The enclosing bank and its outer edge have been substantially overtaken by trees and scrub, so the ringfort announces itself as a thicket before it reveals itself as a monument. Approaching across the level pasture, the vegetation marks out the circuit fairly clearly, but the interior requires more attention. The two crescents near the centre, the larger measuring roughly 22 metres along its longer axis and rising about half a metre, the smaller about nine metres across and barely 20 centimetres above the ground, are subtle enough that without knowing to look for them they might register only as slight unevenness underfoot. This is a site that rewards slow walking and some patience with the terrain rather than a quick circuit of the perimeter.