Not demolished, not quarried away, but simply swallowed. A circular earthen enclosure roughly 25 metres in diameter, it is now so thoroughly buried beneath gorse and briars that the monument is invisible to anyone who does not already know to look for it.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They served as farmsteads and homesteads rather than military fortifications, and many thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. This particular example at Ballinruane was recorded on the 1923 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which captured it as a clearly defined embanked enclosure at a time when it was presumably still legible on the ground. By the time Denis Power compiled the site record, uploaded in August 2011, the monument had been absorbed into young forestry planting and overtaken by dense scrub growth, leaving the earthwork effectively inaccessible and unreadable from the surface.

For anyone attempting to locate the site, the combination of forestry and entrenched scrub makes it a genuinely difficult prospect. Gorse in particular is notoriously impenetrable, and a bank that might otherwise be a clear feature in open pasture offers no visible profile when wrapped in vegetation on all sides. The 1923 OS map remains a useful reference for triangulating the approximate position of the enclosure on the slope, but visitors should expect to find nothing more than a thicket where the monument ought to be. The south-facing aspect that would once have made this a sensible location for a farmstead now simply means the gorse has had good light in which to flourish.