On a low rise in the gently undulating grassland of Mountaincommon in County Mayo, there is almost nothing left to see, and yet the ground itself carries the faint outline of a life once lived behind a circular earthen boundary.

A rath is a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland, defined by one or more banks and ditches thrown up around a homestead. The example at Mountaincommon is a marginal case even by the standards of surviving earthworks. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, which is significant, since ringforts still visible in the landscape at that date were generally recorded. By the time of the 1919 edition, however, cartographers had marked it as a hachured circular enclosure, that is, a roughly circular feature shown through short lines indicating raised or uneven ground, with a diameter of somewhere between thirty and thirty-five metres. Even then, a field fence running on a northeast to southwest axis was already cutting across the northwest portion of the enclosure. Since that edition was published, the rath has been levelled entirely.

What remains today is the field fence, still in place, and to the south of it an irregular area of rough ground roughly thirty to forty metres across. To the north of the fence, the surface gives nothing away. The site sits in a quiet stretch of Mayo grassland with good views of the surrounding country, which may well be why someone chose to build here in the first place, and why a later generation found it convenient to run a fence straight through.