This one in Stonestown, County Westmeath, demands rather more than most. A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed circular or oval farmstead of early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and built to protect a family and their livestock. What once stood on a small, steep natural hillock amid undulating grassland here has been levelled almost entirely, leaving only a short curving arc of poorly preserved earthen bank visible from the south-south-east around to the west. The rest is essentially gone.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey Fair Plan, the meticulous large-scale mapping carried out in the nineteenth century, where it is drawn as a small oval enclosure and annotated simply as "fort". That annotation, modest as it is, confirms the feature was still recognisable at the time of survey. Sometime after that record was made, the earthworks were removed, a fate that has befallen a significant proportion of Ireland's estimated fifty thousand or more ringforts, many of them lost to agricultural improvement over the past two centuries. What the OS surveyors once walked around and carefully plotted now survives mainly as a faint crop mark, visible in a Digital Globe aerial photograph taken in November 2011. Crop marks form when buried or disturbed soil affects the growth of vegetation above it, leaving ghostly outlines that only become readable from the air under the right light and moisture conditions.

There is little to seek out at ground level beyond that fragmentary bank, and the site itself sits within ordinary agricultural land. The aerial photograph remains, in many ways, the clearest surviving record of what the place once looked like.