At Willowbrook in County Sligo, a rath sits quietly in gently undulating pasture on a slight south-west-facing slope, its circular raised area now colonised by trees that grow where, well over a thousand years ago, someone built a home and enclosed it with a substantial bank of earth and stone.

A rath is a type of ringfort, the most common monument class in the Irish archaeological landscape. These were farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and a surrounding ditch, or fosse, that served as much as a social marker as a defensive one. The Willowbrook example measures twenty-six metres in diameter, with a bank some four and a quarter metres wide and rising about seventy centimetres above the interior ground level. What is notably absent here is any visible fosse at ground level, meaning the ditch that would ordinarily have been cut outside the bank has either been filled over time or was never particularly pronounced to begin with. The break in the bank on the south-western side, measuring just over two metres across, marks the original entrance, a detail that has survived remarkably intact and gives some sense of how people once moved in and out of the enclosed space.