The ridge is still there. The camp, for all practical purposes, is not, at least not in any form visible to the eye. What remains are 21 lead shot, three coins, and a scattering of buttons, recovered from the soil of Ardmartin ridge in 2007 and pointing, quietly but insistently, to one of the most consequential military engagements in Irish history.

The camp in question belonged to Lord Deputy Mountjoy, the commander of English Crown forces during the Siege and Battle of Kinsale in 1601. It was one of three principal fortified encampments established around the town, and by any measure it was well chosen. Sited on Ardmartin ridge, which straddled what was then the main road to Cork, it held commanding views of Kinsale itself. On the 27th of October 1601, Mountjoy completed the entrenchment of the camp, and contemporary and near-contemporary sketches and paintings show it as a substantial, deliberately engineered structure. Then, on the 16th of November, with news arriving of the approach of a Gaelic relief force under Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh O'Donnell, Mountjoy moved to strengthen the northern defences, a decision that may have resulted in the camp becoming fully enclosed on all sides for the first time. The siege that followed, and the battle fought on the 24th of December, marked the effective collapse of the Gaelic lordship system in Ireland, making this patch of Cork ridge land a site of genuine historical gravity.

The precise footprint of the camp has never been firmly established. A licensed metal detection survey conducted in 2007 covered part of the ridge and returned the lead shot, coins, and buttons mentioned above, enough to confirm the general area but not enough to pin down exact boundaries. The landscape has shifted in the four centuries since Mountjoy's engineers worked here, and the camp survives now mainly as a location on old maps and in the margins of paintings made by people who were, in some cases, close to the events themselves.