Somewhere in the tillage fields of Ballintubbrid, on a south-facing slope in County Cork, a ringfort once sat whole and circular until a north-south road was driven straight through its middle, bisecting it as cleanly as a line drawn on a map. What remains today is a small portion of earthen bank, just 1.4 metres high, surviving to the south-west. The eastern half has vanished entirely, leaving no surface trace.

A ringfort, or rath, is one of the most common monument types in the Irish landscape, typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period. This one at Ballintubbrid was recorded by Power in 1923 as a lios, a term sometimes used interchangeably with rath for such enclosures, described then as small and circular, with a rampart five feet high. The older Ordnance Survey six-inch maps had already captured it as a hachured semicircular area, roughly twenty metres across on its north-south axis, sitting to the west of the road. That cartographic evidence, combined with what Power observed and the differential vegetation growth still visible on the western side, confirms where the fort once stood, even where the ground itself no longer shows it clearly.