It is the kind of place that most people would walk past without a second glance, yet the Ordnance Survey was already marking it on maps as far back as 1838, labelling it plainly as a rath.

A rath, sometimes also called a ringfort, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were the ordinary domestic settlements of rural Ireland between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries, and several thousand survive in various states across the country. The Cloghnagaune example is modest by any measure: the 1838 six-inch Ordnance Survey map records it simply as a site, and by the 1907 edition it was mapped as a small enclosure with a maximum diameter of around thirty metres. Aerial imagery from 2003 confirms that the circular bank was still legible at that point, the unplanted clearing in the surrounding forestry preserving its outline where tree cover might otherwise have swallowed it entirely.