A ringfort, or rath, a type of circular farmstead enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch that was the standard form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, once stood here, roughly forty metres across. It has been ploughed flat. What gave it away was not any physical trace on the ground but the crop growing above it: in aerial photographs taken in July 1989, a circular cropmark emerged, showing the outline of the bank and a wide external fosse, the ditch that would have ringed the whole enclosure. Variations in soil depth and moisture left by long-buried earthworks can cause crops to ripen at different rates, leaving patterns readable only from above.

What makes this particular piece of farmland stranger still is that the Egmont ringfort was not alone. Two other levelled ringforts lie within easy reach of it, one roughly fifty metres to the north and another around a hundred and fifty metres to the west-southwest. The same aerial survey that identified this enclosure also picked up linear cropmarks in the same field, possibly the ghostly traces of old field boundaries associated with the settlement. In early medieval Ireland, ringforts rarely existed in complete isolation; farming communities tended to cluster, and it appears that this corner of north Cork was once a small concentration of such enclosed farmsteads, all of them subsequently reduced to nothing more than faint chemical signatures beneath the soil.