At Ballinadrum in County Carlow, a ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that once dotted the Irish countryside in its thousands during the early medieval period, has been worn down to almost nothing: a slight rise in the ground, roughly thirty metres across and less than half a metre high, with a faint concave dip at its centre where the interior once sat.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were typically circular enclosures defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch, known as a fosse, and they functioned as defended farmsteads for farming families from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. The Ballinadrum example still shows traces of that fosse in aerial photography from 1989, where the circular earthwork reads more clearly from above than it ever could from ground level. That photograph, catalogued under reference GB89.AH.24, captures what cultivation has been steadily erasing, a low circular form that the surrounding agricultural activity has continued to press upon. By the time the site was formally described, it was already recorded as under cultivation, which goes a long way toward explaining its present condition.