The flowers are not wild. Someone planted them, and they have presumably returned each spring ever since, blooming inside walls that were built, at the very least, well over a thousand years ago. It is an incongruous combination: early medieval enclosure, grazing land, and a domestic flourish of yellow that belongs more to a cottage garden than an archaeological monument.

The structure is a cashel, the term used for a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks and ditches. Ringforts were the typical farmstead of early medieval Ireland, and cashels of this kind are particularly common in the rocky landscapes of west Cork, where field stone was more readily available than the material needed for earthworks. This example is roughly circular, measuring about 24.6 metres north to south and 24 metres east to west, enclosed by a dry-stone wall standing 1.9 metres high. The construction is substantial: large boulders form the facing on either side, with smaller stones packed into the core between them. A gap 2.25 metres wide in the north-north-west section of the wall served as the original entrance, or at least the principal break that survives. Walls of this height would have offered real protection for livestock and household alike, and the careful coursing of large and small stone suggests this was not a modest or hasty construction.