Their answer was to raise the interior on that side, effectively levelling the living space by hand before a single post was driven or a roof raised. That small engineering decision, made perhaps fifteen hundred years ago, is still readable in the earthwork today.

A rath, as this type of monument is more precisely known, is an early medieval enclosed settlement, typically dating from roughly 500 to 1000 AD, in which an earthen bank and ditch defined a farmstead and offered a degree of protection for livestock and family alike. The example at Ballynatona is roughly circular, measuring about 40 metres east to west and 37.5 metres north to south. Its main bank stands approximately 2 metres high, with an external fosse, or ditch, still traceable at around 0.4 metres deep. A second, outer bank, reaching about 1.4 metres in height, is visible along the ENE to SE arc of the circuit. The presence of two concentric banks, where many raths have only one, hints at a degree of status or at least effort on the part of the original occupants. There is a gap of about 4 metres in the main bank to the ENE, almost certainly the original entrance. Less deliberately, field fence clearance material has been dumped along the line of the outer bank from the SE round to the NNW, which obscures that portion of the monument but has at least kept the ground from being ploughed.