The example at Tullig in County Clare is one of these, a rath sitting quietly in the landscape of a county already dense with early medieval earthworks.

A rath, in its simplest form, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They served as farmsteads, the homes of farming families and minor lords, and the bank and ditch offered a degree of protection for livestock as much as for people. Clare's karst and coastal terrain holds an unusually varied collection of such sites, from the dramatic stone cashels of the Burren to more modest earthen examples like this one at Tullig, where the underlying geology and land use have shaped what survives.