The one at Coolnaleen in north Kerry offers almost none of that. What survives is a crescent of raised earth, no more than seventy centimetres high, with faint traces of a bank to the east and south-west that are, as the surveyors put it, barely perceptible. The original circuit measured roughly twenty-nine metres across, but the bulk of it has been levelled away, leaving a site that reads less as a monument and more as a very slight irregularity in the field.

A univallate rath, meaning one enclosed by a single bank and ditch rather than multiple concentric rings, was the standard dwelling form of early medieval Ireland, typically housing a farming family and their livestock. What makes Coolnaleen more interesting than its depleted condition might suggest is what turned up during drainage work cut through the centre of the enclosure: burnt stones, charcoal, and what may be the remains of a fulacht fiadh. A fulacht fiadh is a prehistoric cooking site, usually identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stones beside a timber or stone-lined trough, where water was heated by dropping in stones from a fire. Finding traces of one within or beside a rath suggests this particular patch of ground was in use across more than one period, the cooking technology predating the enclosure by potentially thousands of years. The association between fulachta fiadh and raths is not uncommon in Irish archaeology, but each instance raises the same quietly unanswered question about whether the earlier feature drew later settlement, or whether the overlap is simply coincidence.