Look closer, and the geometry gives it away: a near-perfect ring just over ten metres across, with stones breaking through the turf along the top of the bank, and a gap on the southern side that almost certainly marks where an entrance once stood.

This kind of structure is known in Irish archaeology as an enclosure, a broad category that encompasses anything from a small pastoral pen to a more substantial ringfort, the latter being a circular earthen or stone enclosure used for settlement and the protection of livestock, common across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is the care taken with the interior. Rather than simply raising a bank around flat ground, whoever built it worked with the natural slope: the eastern side of the interior is built up slightly, and the western side is cut back into the hillside, with the result that the floor within is very nearly level. That kind of deliberate shaping implies a functional space rather than a casual boundary. The bank itself is modest, standing roughly sixty to seventy centimetres above the interior ground and not much higher on the outside, with a width of around two and a third metres. It sits to the south-east of the Drimminboy River, in the kind of marginal upland terrain that was often more intensively used in earlier centuries than it appears today.