The one at Ardnageehy in County Cork has taken a different path. Centuries of grazing and agricultural pressure have worn it almost flat, leaving what survives as a shallow, saucer-shaped depression in the pasture, roughly 31 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west, its perimeter marked by a rise of no more than half a metre. To a passing eye it reads as a gentle undulation in a field; to someone who knows what to look for, that same undulation is the ghost of an Early Medieval enclosed farmstead.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths when their enclosures were earthen rather than stone, were the dominant settlement type in Ireland from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. They typically housed a single farming family and their livestock, the raised bank and internal ditch serving as both a practical barrier against animal predators and a marker of status and territory. What makes the Ardnageehy site quietly compelling is what lies beneath it: a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, runs in the interior. Souterrains were commonly constructed within ringforts during the same period, used variously for cool storage of dairy produce and, in times of trouble, as refuges. Their presence beneath a levelled site is a reminder that the most visually diminished monument can still retain considerable archaeological depth, literally so in this case.