Fairy fort

Fairy forts (also known as lios or raths from the Irish, referring to an earthen mound) are the remains of stone circles, ringforts, hillforts, or other circular prehistoric dwellings in Ireland.

[1] From possibly the late Iron Age to early Christian times, people built circular structures with earth banks or ditches.

[4] As of 1991, there were between thirty and forty thousand identifiable fairy forts in Ireland's countryside,[5] the oldest of them possibly dating back as early as 600 BCE.

For example, one story collected in 1907 tells that a man who had engaged workers to level an earthwork fairy fort at Dooneeva or Doonmeeve (near Lahinch in County Clare) fell dead; his wife, a wise woman, magically resurrected him unharmed.

[4] In 2007, Danny Healy-Rae suggested that the N22 remained in bad condition despite renovation work because it was built on a local network of fairy forts, while the Road Department talked about "a deeper underlying subsoil/geotechnical problem".