No other surface trace remains. And yet, for anyone alert to what they are looking at, that faint arc of earth is the ghost outline of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the type of roughly circular enclosed settlement that was built in its thousands across Ireland during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries.

What makes the situation here quietly interesting is that this is not an isolated remnant. Approximately fifty metres to the north-north-west sits another earthwork entirely. Two such features in such proximity suggests this small patch of north Galway was once a more populated or organised landscape than the empty fields now imply. The nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the first systematic cartographic record of the Irish countryside, recorded this site as a circular enclosure with a diameter of around thirty-five metres, which gives some sense of its original form even if almost nothing of that form is now legible on the ground. That diameter is modest but not unusual for a rath of this kind, roughly the size of a large farmyard, likely enclosing a family dwelling and associated outbuildings behind an earthen bank that would once have been considerably more pronounced.