But the earthwork at Ballintaw is older than the hedgerows and boundaries that now crowd against it, a ringfort, or rath, of the kind that once served as an enclosed farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Tens of thousands of these monuments survive across the country, but each one carries its own particular shape and story of survival.

This example sits in flat pasture, approximately 225 metres south-west of a separate enclosure recorded nearby. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 already shows it as a circular earthwork, its northern edge incorporated into a field boundary even then, a sign of how agricultural pressure had begun to encroach. The more detailed OSi 25-inch mapping records a roughly circular area of around 22 metres in diameter, defined by a bank running from north around through east, south, and south-west, with a scarp and an external fosse, essentially a ditch dug around the outside of the enclosure, visible from the north-east around to the south-west. A post-1700 field boundary running east to west has truncated the monument at its northern side. By the time aerial photographs were taken by the Aerial Survey of Ireland in September 2002, and again in orthophotographs captured between 2005 and 2012, the site appeared as a sub-circular area enclosed by a tree-covered bank, its northern edge still cut through by that later boundary. A Google Earth image from April 2006 offers a faint but legible trace of the external fosse at the south-east.

The site is on private farmland, so access would require the landowner's permission. Because the bank is now heavily tree-covered, the most legible views come from aerial or satellite imagery rather than ground level, where the earthwork can easily read as no more than a slightly raised, overgrown margin between fields. Those who do get close should look for the curve of the bank itself and, particularly at the south-eastern arc, any depression in the ground that might correspond to the recorded fosse. The flat landscape means there is little natural drama to the approach, but that very flatness is part of what makes the survival of even this much of the original form worth noting.