A few slight undulations in the grass, easy to walk past without a second thought. Yet those faint swellings in the ground are what remain of a ringfort, a circular earthen enclosure that once sat prominently on this high ground, its banks commanding views in every direction.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a type of enclosed settlement typical of early medieval Ireland, usually defined by one or more circular earthen banks and ditches. They were built primarily as farmsteads, offering a degree of protection for people and livestock. The one at Rathnaconeen was recorded on Ordnance Survey maps in both 1838 and 1930 as a circular embanked enclosure somewhere between 25 and 30 metres in diameter. Its presence on both maps suggests it survived largely intact through most of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. At some point in the early 1900s, however, it was levelled, most likely to improve the land for agricultural use, a fate that came to many such monuments across the country during that period. By the time anyone thought to record what local people remembered of it, only the memory and the faint ground evidence remained.