On the north side, where the hillslope drops away, the interior has been deliberately raised to keep the enclosed ground level. It is a quiet piece of practical engineering, invisible unless you know to look for it, and it speaks to the considered effort that went into even a modest fortification of this kind.

A rath, as ringforts of this earthen variety are sometimes called, is essentially a roughly circular enclosure defined by a bank and, usually, a ditch, used as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period in Ireland. This example at Carrignamaddry sits in pasture on a north-facing slope overlooking the Finnow River valley in mid Cork. The enclosure measures approximately 26 metres north to south and 24.6 metres east to west. Its boundary is formed by a bank of earth and stone, which survives to an internal height of around 0.6 metres and an external height of 0.35 metres along the north-east to west-south-west arc, while a scarp, a steep natural or cut slope, rising to 1.1 metres, defines the perimeter elsewhere. Crossing the interior on a north-south axis are the faint remains of cultivation ridges, suggesting that at some point after the enclosure fell out of use as a defended space, the ground within was turned over to farming.