The one at Tooreen in north County Galway offers almost none of that. What survives is barely a ghost of a monument, a faint scarp curving from the north-west around to the east, the remnant arc of what was once a circular rath roughly 25 metres across. A rath is a ringfort defined by an earthen bank rather than stone, typically enclosing a farmstead during the early medieval period, and Tooreen's example would once have been a recognisable, functional enclosure of that type. Now, only that partial scarp remains visible, sitting on a low hillock in undulating grassland.

The reason so little survives is not the gradual erosion of centuries but something more purposeful. Extensive quarrying has removed the surface traces across most of the site, obliterating the monument where the ground was economically useful. A field bank cuts across what remains at the south-west and north, further dividing the already diminished structure. The published archaeological inventory for north Galway, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling and issued in 1999, describes it plainly as very poorly preserved, which is perhaps an understatement given how thoroughly the landform has been reworked. What the quarrying took was not just soil and stone but the spatial logic of the place, the sense of enclosure that would have defined it as a settlement site in the early medieval Irish countryside.