That act of practical erasure is, in its own way, more revealing than the monument itself: it tells you something about how thoroughly these sites were absorbed back into the working landscape long before anyone thought to record them.

A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built primarily as a farmstead during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. This particular example sits on a broad drumlin, the low elongated hill formed by glacial deposits that characterise much of the Irish midlands. The enclosure is subcircular in plan, measuring about twenty metres across on its longer axis. It is defined by a combination of an earthen bank, a scarp on its south-western to north-western arc, and an outer fosse, which is a shallow ditch, surviving to between half a metre and nearly a metre and a half in external height around different sections of its circumference. The laneway running north-west to south-east overlies the interior south-west of centre, accounting for much of the damage to the bank. A second rath survives roughly two hundred metres to the north-east, suggesting this part of Cloonshee once carried a modest concentration of enclosed early medieval settlement.