At Ballinlegane in County Cork, an east-facing slope of tillage land contains what remains of a ringfort, one of those circular earthen enclosures that served as the farmsteads and defended homesteads of early medieval Ireland. The rampart that once defined this one is gone, levelled around 1972, but a low circular rise in the soil still traces its outline, a subtle ridge where a substantial bank used to be.

As recently as 1917, the antiquarian Power described it as a well-preserved circular lios, the Irish term for an earthen ringfort, with a rampart standing some six to eight feet high. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map had already recorded it clearly, showing a circular enclosure roughly forty metres in diameter, a fairly typical size for such structures. Tens of thousands of ringforts survive across Ireland in various states, but this one crossed from the living record into the archaeological one within living memory, a casualty of mid-twentieth-century land improvement. What makes the field at Ballinlegane a little stranger still is that it also contains a gallán, a standing stone, positioned to the northwest of where the ringfort stood. The two monuments sharing the same ground suggests a landscape that was already marked and meaningful long before the ringfort's builders arrived.