The example at Lisheenabrone, in County Mayo, is one such site, a rath sitting in a landscape that has been farmed and inhabited for well over a millennium. A rath is an enclosure, typically circular, formed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They served as farmsteads, protecting a family's home, animals, and small-scale agricultural activity from both opportunistic raiding and the general uncertainties of the era.

The place name itself offers a small clue to the site's character. Lisheenabrone derives from the Irish, with "lisheen" being a diminutive form of "lios", another word for a ringfort or enclosure, suggesting that the feature was embedded in local consciousness long enough to name the land around it. County Mayo contains a considerable concentration of such monuments, shaped by the patterns of early medieval settlement across the west of Ireland, where dispersed farmsteads rather than nucleated villages defined how people organised themselves on the land. The survival of a rath at Lisheenabrone into the present day points to centuries of the site being recognised, consciously or otherwise, as something worth working around rather than through.