The example at Carrowkeel in County Mayo is one such site, a rath sitting quietly in a townland whose name, derived from the Irish An Cheathrú Chaol, meaning the narrow quarter, hints at the kind of marginal, boundary-edged terrain where early medieval people so often chose to build.

Raths were enclosed farmsteads, typically constructed between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. A circular bank of earth, sometimes reinforced with a ditch, defined a domestic space that would have contained a house, outbuildings, and small agricultural structures. They were not primarily defensive in the military sense; the enclosure marked status, defined the household, and kept livestock in or predators out. Mayo has a considerable number of surviving examples, reflecting the density of early medieval settlement across the west of Ireland, where the land, however thin, sustained communities for centuries. Carrowkeel itself appears as a placename in several parts of the county, each a reminder of how the landscape was once parcelled into intimate named units long before modern administrative boundaries arrived.