The White Horse Fort, Cardrath, Co. Meath

When the Ordnance Survey recorded the site in 1836, they marked it faintly on their six-inch map and wrote the annotation "The White Horse Fort", though with an inconsistency worth noticing: only the word "Fort" appeared in gothic script, the style conventionally used for antiquities, while the full name was rendered entirely in gothic on the later 1908 edition. Whether this reflects a shift in how the site was understood, or simply a cartographic correction, it gives the place an odd double life in the archival record.

The monument itself is a rath, a type of enclosed settlement common across early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular or subcircular area defined by an earthen bank and ditch. This example sits at the tip of a gentle west-to-east spur of land and measures roughly 34 metres east to west and 29 metres north to south. Its defining feature is a scrub-covered scarp, a low slope or escarpment forming the boundary of the enclosure, which varies in width and height around the circuit: broader and slightly lower to the northwest, narrower and marginally higher to the southeast. Outside this runs a fosse, the shallow ditch that would once have reinforced the enclosure's boundary, though here it survives only faintly, no more than about 20 centimetres deep at its most measurable point. Over time the scarp has been absorbed into a field bank and the fosse repurposed as an agricultural drain, so the site has been quietly reshaped by the working landscape around it. No original entrance has been identified.