On an east-facing slope in Toorreagh, County Waterford, a gently raised oval of grass marks what was once a defended early medieval farmstead. The site is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a circular or near-circular enclosure bounded by earthen banks that served as the homestead of a farming family, most commonly between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is the asymmetry built into its earthwork: the bank is considerably taller on the eastern, downslope side than on the western, which speaks to a practical intelligence in the original construction. The builders compensated for the natural fall of the ground, ensuring that the enclosure presented a more imposing face to anyone approaching from below.

The 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a bivallate embanked enclosure, meaning it was originally understood to have two concentric banks rather than one, with an external diameter of around 55 metres. On the ground today, the inner area measures roughly 30 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, defined by an earthen bank between 8 and 9 metres wide. The height of that bank varies noticeably: on the interior, it rises from about half a metre at the eastern, lower side to around 1.6 metres at the west, while the exterior face reaches 1.7 metres on the west and climbs to 2.3 metres on the east, where the slope drops away and the bank needed to do more work. A south-eastern entrance, just over 4 metres wide, survives clearly enough to be measured, though there is no visible fosse, the ditch that typically accompanied such banks and from which the upcast material was dug to form them. Whether the fosse was never cut here, or has simply silted and spread beyond recognition, is not recorded.