The one at Ballygriffin in County Wicklow is a quieter case: a circular enclosure roughly fifty metres across, of which only the southern portion of the original bank now survives, absorbed into a field boundary on a gentle east-facing slope. The structure itself has, in a sense, been pressed into continued agricultural service, its ancient edge repurposed as the kind of unremarkable hedgerow or earthen division that most people pass without a second glance.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earthen banks rather than stone, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the sixth to the twelfth century. They functioned primarily as enclosed farmsteads, the circular bank and ditch providing a boundary for a family's dwelling and livestock rather than any serious military fortification. Thousands once existed across the country; many have been levelled by centuries of ploughing or land clearance, and what remains at Ballygriffin represents a fairly typical fate for those that did not survive intact. The site sits on land that has clearly been worked for a very long time, and the partial bank that remains is less a monument than a trace, a faint insistence on an older arrangement of the ground.