It is easy to mistake such a feature for a natural rise in the ground, but the regularity of the curve and the occasional glimpse of stone facing give it away as something deliberate and very old.

This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that was the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, though many have been ploughed out or built over. The example at Cloghane More survives as a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank standing about a metre high, with stone facing visible in sections, suggesting that the original construction was more substantial than what remains today. A gap roughly four metres wide opens the bank to the south-east, most likely the original entrance. The interior would once have contained a timber or stone dwelling, outbuildings, and perhaps a souterrain, an underground passage used for storage or refuge, though no such features are noted here. The whole is now heavily overgrown, the kind of place that generations of farming activity have left alone, whether out of practical inconvenience or the older, quieter unease that attached itself in Irish rural tradition to such enclosures, locally known as fairy forts.