The circular enclosure at Ballyglass in County Galway does almost the opposite. Sitting on a gently south-westward-facing grassland slope, it measures roughly 32 metres across and survives as little more than a scarp, a low vertical face of earth about a metre high, with a fosse, or defensive ditch, running along its outer edge. Where later field banks have cut across the monument at its north-west and south-west, even those faint traces largely disappear, leaving a structure that asks something of the eye before it gives anything back.

What can be read with slightly more confidence lies at the north-east, where a linear hollow, around six metres wide and up to half a metre deep, branches off from the fosse at a right angle. Features like this are occasionally associated with enclosures of early medieval date, though without excavation the function and precise age of this one remain uncertain. Circular enclosures of this general type, sometimes called ringforts when they show evidence of domestic settlement, were among the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Ballyglass example is too worn to say with confidence where it sits within that broad category, which is part of what makes it genuinely interesting: the degradation itself becomes the story, a record of centuries of agricultural activity pressing steadily against an older landscape.