No earthwork rises above the ground, no stones protrude, no obvious feature interrupts the farmland. What survives is a cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in growing crops that reveals, to a camera looking down from altitude, the ghost of a buried fosse. A fosse is a defensive ditch, and this one traces a roughly circular path about thirty metres across. It was caught in a single aerial photograph taken in July 1975, and without that image the enclosure would likely remain unknown at ground level.

Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, most of them the remains of raths or ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands and date broadly to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. The fosse would originally have surrounded a raised interior, providing both a physical boundary and a degree of social definition, marking out a family's dwelling place from the land around it. At Carrigoon More, the enclosure has been reduced to little more than a soil stain, its ditch filled in over centuries of cultivation. What makes the site quietly interesting is that it does not stand alone. A second, similar enclosure lies roughly two hundred and fifty metres to the north-east, suggesting that this part of north Cork may once have supported a small cluster of neighbouring farmsteads, their inhabitants close enough to see one another's boundaries, if not quite close enough to share them.