A ringfort, or rath, was a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or settlement. This one survived long enough to be mapped twice in the nineteenth century and once more in the twentieth, each time showing a circular raised platform of around thirty to thirty-five metres across, with a fosse, or external ditch, visible to the west on the 1936 Ordnance Survey edition. Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, according to local accounts, the earthwork was levelled, most likely during agricultural improvement work of the kind that removed many such sites across Ireland during that era.

What the eye cannot easily see, the camera occasionally recovers. An aerial photograph taken in May 1977, shortly before or around the time of the levelling, captured the enclosure as a soilmark, a faint shadow in the ground where the buried bank interrupts the soil's moisture and chemistry enough to show up from altitude. On the ground today, a slight arc of rising terrain may still trace the ghost of that bank, though it requires attention and a degree of patience to read it as anything other than ordinary unevenness. About 110 metres to the south-south-east, in the next field, lies a second levelled ringfort, suggesting this corner of Ardglass once held a small cluster of early medieval settlement activity. Such pairings are not uncommon in Cork; ringforts are among the most numerous monument types in the Irish landscape, and neighbouring examples sometimes reflect family or community groupings from the first millennium AD.