This is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was once the standard unit of rural settlement across early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the sixth to the twelfth centuries. What makes the Ballycormick example worth pausing over is precisely how little of it remains legible, and how much agricultural life has pressed in around it.

The enclosure measures approximately 33.5 metres north to south and 26.5 metres east to west, with an earthen bank that survives to an internal height of just 0.1 metres and an external height of 0.2 metres, barely enough to cast a shadow. The bank runs from the south-west around to the north-west, and from the north-east around to the south-east, but at both the north and south the enclosing element has been cut through by later field boundaries. Those boundaries converge to form a sharp acute angle roughly 28 metres east of the enclosure itself, a configuration that suggests generations of land division happening in deliberate ignorance of, or simply indifference to, what lay beside them. The survey was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011.

The interior of the enclosure and much of the surviving bank are covered in furze, the dense, thorny scrub common to neglected or ungrazed ground in Ireland, which makes close inspection difficult and the outlines of the earthwork hard to follow on foot. Cattle accessing a stream that runs along the base of the field boundary on the northern side of that converging angle have further disturbed the ground, a process known as poaching, which churns the soil and obscures low earthwork features. Anyone visiting should expect the site to read better from a slight distance than from within it, and should be prepared for the interior to be essentially impassable in places. It sits in working farmland, so access and conditions will depend on the season and the current use of the field.