The one at Ballinaclogh in County Wicklow came to light in a rather less gentle way: it was uncovered during road improvement works on the N11 in 2003, the kind of discovery that tends to arrive as an inconvenience to engineers and a gift to archaeologists.

What the subsequent excavation revealed was a portion of a steep-sided ditch, roughly 14.6 metres long and between 1.8 and 2.2 metres wide, cut into the ground with the sharp profile characteristic of a rath, the earthen version of a ringfort defined by just such a surrounding ditch and internal bank. Inside this feature, excavators found burnt animal bone, charcoal, heat-shattered stones, and fragments of a quernstone, the flat rotary grinding stone used in early medieval households to mill grain. A quernstone is a modest but telling object; its presence points to domestic life, to someone processing food within or close to this enclosure. A second ditch feature, around 6.65 metres in length and located to the north, was also excavated, and the site's excavator suggested it may represent another arm of the same ringfort ditch. The work was carried out under Excavation Licence No. 03E1038, with findings published by Lynch in 2005.