At Ballinvarrig in County Cork, that is more or less what remains: low undulations in a pasture field, the ghost of a circular enclosure roughly 25 metres across. A rath, as this type of earthwork is commonly known, was typically a roughly circular banked enclosure used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but a great many have been reduced to exactly this, a slight unevenness underfoot that most walkers would not pause to question.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, recorded at that point as a circular enclosure, which suggests it was still traceable in the landscape at the time of the first systematic mapping of Ireland. Sometime between that survey and the present, the earthworks were levelled, most likely through agricultural clearance. The 1994 Archaeological Inventory of County Cork noted its condition as levelled, with only those low undulations remaining in the field. At roughly 25 metres in diameter, it would have been a modest enclosure by the standards of the period, perhaps the homestead of a single farming family, defined in its original form by an earthen bank and possibly a ditch.