That break in the bank is one of the more telling details at this ringfort in Bellanurly, a rath of the kind that once dotted the Irish countryside in their thousands during the early medieval period. A rath, to give the term its due, was a roughly circular enclosure formed from earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead and dwelling place rather than a military fortification in any strict sense.

The enclosure here is a circle of around 37 metres in diameter, raised slightly above the surrounding pasture on a south-facing slope. The bank that defines it is broad, nearly four and a half metres wide, though it now stands only about 45 centimetres above the interior ground level. Running along its outer base is a fosse, the shallow ditch that would originally have reinforced the sense of enclosure, measuring some two and a half metres wide and half a metre deep. The geometry is still legible in the landscape, even if time and agricultural practicality have worked steadily against it. A conifer plantation, roughly 25 years old at the time of survey, has crept into the western side of the interior, its roots and growth doing quiet damage to the bank and gradually silting up the fosse between west-south-west and north-west. Elsewhere, modern field drainage has been cut into and around the fosse, repurposing the ancient ditch as a functional channel at the north-west, south-east, and south-west. The original entrance, that narrow break in the bank to the north-north-east, survives despite everything, a small structural fact connecting the present field to whatever daily life this enclosure once contained.