Some archaeological sites announce themselves with tumbled stone or a dramatic silhouette against the sky. This one, in the townland of Glen in County Waterford, does the opposite. A ringfort, the type of circular enclosed farmstead built across Ireland roughly between the third and tenth centuries, lies at the bottom of a south-facing slope in ordinary pasture, and from ground level there is simply nothing to see. The enclosure has sunk, or been worn, or been absorbed into the field so completely that the eye finds no purchase on it at all.

What we know comes from the Ordnance Survey's six-inch mapping of 1840, which recorded it as a circular embanked enclosure with an external diameter of approximately thirty-five metres. That measurement places it in the middle range for ringforts, which typically served as the defended farmsteads of early medieval families, their earthen banks enclosing a house, animals, and a small working yard. The 1840 surveyors were meticulous about capturing features that were already fading from the landscape, and the fact that this one was recorded then, but is now invisible at ground level, suggests that whatever bank remained in the nineteenth century has since been levelled entirely, whether by ploughing, land improvement, or simple time.