But beneath the grass at Ballinclemesig lies the ghost of a ringfort that was already being erased from the landscape more than two decades before the turn of this century, levelled by agricultural activity until no trace remained above ground. What makes this site quietly remarkable is that it refused to disappear entirely: aerial photography by the Geological Survey of Ireland continued to reveal its outline long after the earthworks had been ploughed flat.

Known in Irish as Lios Ard, meaning the high ringfort, the site was classified as a bivallate rath, that is, a roughly circular enclosure defined by two concentric banks and ditches, a form associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. The double-bank arrangement is generally taken to indicate a site of some status or defensive ambition. It was recorded on Ordnance Survey maps of both 1842 and 1916, meaning it survived as a visible earthwork for at least the better part of a century before being lost at ground level. Its existence was documented in C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995 through Brandon Press in association with FÁS, a comprehensive effort to catalogue the archaeological heritage of the region before more of it slipped away.

There is little for a visitor to see on the ground today. The value of this place lies less in what is visible than in what the aerial record preserves: a faint cropmark or soil shadow that traces the curve of two vanished banks, a reminder that the Irish landscape holds an enormous number of sites whose physical presence has been reduced to almost nothing, but whose shape endures in the right light, at the right altitude, in the right season.