The one at Powerstown in North Cork does neither. It sits at the base of a south-facing slope, with the land rising again to the north behind it, which is precisely what makes it worth a second look. Whoever chose this location was not following the usual logic, and archaeologists have noted as much, remarking that it does not conform to a typical ringfort setting.

By 1842, when the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map of the area, the enclosure was already reduced enough that cartographers recorded it using hachures, the fine lines used to indicate earthworks, rather than as a standing structure. The circle they recorded measured roughly twenty metres in diameter. Today, even that trace is mostly gone. What remains is a low, curved rise in the pasture, running from west to east-south-east, the ghost of the original circuit. About fifteen metres to the north-west lies a fulacht fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough or hollow, where water would have been heated using hot stones. The proximity of the two features is suggestive, though whether they were in use at the same time is not known. Together they hint at a stretch of ground that was, for some period, a place where people lived and worked rather than simply passed through.