Except that here, there are no walls. There is, in fact, nothing to see at all.

A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches, used in Ireland primarily between the sixth and twelfth centuries as a farmstead and, in some cases, as a place of status and defence. The one at Ballinrea was known locally as a lios, the Irish term for such an enclosure, and it measured approximately forty metres in diameter, which would have made it a reasonably substantial example. According to a personal communication from S. O'Mahony, it was removed during the last century, presumably as farmland was cleared and consolidated. No visible surface trace survives. What does remain nearby is a standing stone, a separate prehistoric monument that predates the ringfort by potentially thousands of years, and whose presence beside the vanished enclosure is one of those small coincidences of landscape that archaeological maps occasionally throw up.

The pasture sits atop an east-west ridge, and the southern view that once gave this place its practical logic is presumably unchanged even now. The standing stone is still there, a solitary upright in a field where its nearest archaeological companion has long since been ploughed or levelled away.