In the townland of Deerpark in County Kilkenny, a ringfort sits in pastureland with a townland boundary running immediately to its west, and that boundary makes a small but deliberate kink outward to avoid the monument. Nobody drew a straight line through it. That deflection, preserved across centuries of map-making, says something about how the site was regarded long after anyone had lived within it.

A ringfort, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank or banks, typically built during the early medieval period as a farmstead or high-status residence. This example is defined not by a raised bank but by a fosse, a wide defensive ditch, measuring around eight metres across, which encircles an interior roughly thirty to thirty-five metres in diameter. That is a reasonably substantial enclosure. It appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839 to 1840, and was still recorded as legible on the 1945 to 1946 revision, which means it survived at least a century of agricultural activity without being levelled or filled in. Today, the site is heavily overgrown with trees, which both conceals it and, in a practical sense, protects it from the plough.