To a passing eye it might read as nothing more than a slight unevenness in the grass, a modest swelling in an otherwise flat landscape. In fact, it is the ghost of an early medieval ringfort, a rath, the earthen bank of which has been ploughed or otherwise levelled away over time, leaving only the raised interior platform as evidence that something once stood here.

A rath was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or place of residence during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands were built across the country, and thousands have since been lost to agriculture. At Knocknaloman, the enclosure measured approximately 26.3 metres east to west and 26 metres north to south, making it a fairly modest example of the type. Its outline was clear enough to be mapped on the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets of 1842, 1904, and 1938, each depicting it as a hachured circular feature, the standard cartographic shorthand for an earthwork. By the time of more recent ground inspection, the banks themselves had gone, but that low, circular platform endures in the pasture, its dimensions still legible to anyone who knows what to look for.