Rathbeg, in the townland of Gortnahurra in County Mayo, contains within it the Irish word ráth, referring to a ringfort, one of the most common yet persistently mysterious monument types in the Irish landscape. These were typically enclosed farmsteads or places of settlement, built from the early medieval period onwards, their circular earthen banks defining a domestic world that has long since vanished. The diminutive suffix beg, meaning small, suggests this was a modest example even by the standards of its time.

Beyond its name and its place on the map, very little can currently be said about this particular site with any certainty. The source material available at this moment is thin, and to speculate about its precise dimensions, condition, or history would be to invent rather than inform. What can be said is that Mayo contains hundreds of such monuments, scattered across bogland, hillside, and pasture, many of them worn almost to invisibility by centuries of farming and weather, others still legible as low circular earthworks when the light falls at the right angle across the ground. Gortnahurra itself, whose name may derive from the Irish for a field of the yew, sits in a county where the archaeological record is dense but unevenly documented.