Somewhere in the pasture at Ballykilmurry, a ringfort exists almost entirely on paper. A ringfort is a roughly circular enclosure, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, that served as a farmstead or settlement during the early medieval period in Ireland. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. This one, however, has effectively vanished from the surface of the land, leaving no visible trace at ground level.

What we know of it comes from the Ordnance Survey's six-inch mapping programme, carried out in 1840, which recorded it as a circular embanked enclosure with an external diameter of around thirty metres, sitting towards the bottom of a north-facing slope. At the time of the survey, the earthworks were apparently legible enough to be documented. Since then, agricultural use of the land as pasture has reduced or entirely levelled whatever remained, leaving the feature identifiable only through cartographic evidence and, presumably, subsurface archaeology that has yet to be investigated.

There is little for a visitor to see here in any conventional sense, which is itself part of what makes the site quietly thought-provoking. A ringfort that can only be located by consulting a nineteenth-century map, on a gentle slope in County Waterford, says something about how much of the early medieval landscape has been absorbed back into the fields around it.