The one at Kilgar in County Westmeath does the opposite. It has been almost completely levelled, and what remains above ground is little more than a band of vegetation roughly four metres wide, tracing a sub-rectangular outline approximately 42 metres north to south and 46 metres east to west. The site sits on a natural hillock in gently rolling pastureland, a position that would once have offered clear sightlines in every direction, exactly the kind of elevated ground that early medieval farming families favoured when enclosing their homesteads behind an earthen bank and ditch. Today, the enclosure itself is nearly gone, but the shape of the place still carries a certain quiet logic.

A ringfort, to use the broadest definition, is a roughly circular enclosed settlement dating mainly from the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD, though the form persisted longer in some areas. They are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, with tens of thousands recorded, and most survive well enough to be read from ground level. Kilgar is unusual in how thoroughly it has been reduced. The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the enclosure as still sufficiently distinct to be depicted, which means the levelling occurred sometime in the century and a half after that survey. Inside the outline, the ground retains vague traces of two rectangular hut sites, and cultivation ridges running roughly north-northwest to south-southeast cut across the interior, suggesting the enclosed area was at some point turned over to agricultural use, likely contributing to its gradual erasure. A gap of about 4.5 metres in the vegetation band on the west-northwest side may mark the original entrance.

What the human eye now struggles to read, aerial photography resolves with some clarity. A Digital Globe aerial photograph taken in November 2011 shows the full outline as a cropmark, the differential growth of vegetation over buried features tracing the shape of the old enclosure from above. A second ringfort lies around 200 metres to the south-east, suggesting this part of Westmeath was once a settled and relatively well-organised farming landscape, even if very little of that remains visible at ground level today.