The one at Ballyegny in County Limerick is considerably less obliging. Only an arc of its enclosing earthworks, running from the north-west to the north-east, is freely accessible. The interior is choked with thorn bushes and nettles, and the whole site sits in working pasture on a north-facing slope, where cattle have already worn down the inner bank to near-nothing on its northern side. What you are looking at, if you can read it through the overgrowth, is a bivallate ringfort, meaning one defended by two concentric banks rather than one, which generally signals a settlement of some local importance.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when built from earthworks, were the standard form of rural enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They functioned primarily as farmsteads, the banks and ditches protecting a household and its livestock rather than serving any serious military purpose. The Ballyegny example is roughly circular, with a diameter of approximately 35 metres. Between its two banks lies a fosse, the ditch that separates them, which here is notably wide and flat-bottomed, measuring around five metres at its base. The outer bank, a mixture of earth and stone, survives best along its south-eastern to north-eastern arc, where it has become partially absorbed into the surrounding field system. At the north-north-west, there is a gap of about six metres in the outer bank where a field boundary that once abutted it has since been removed. The site was documented by Denis Power, with notes uploaded in August 2011.

The site sits in active farmland, so access is a matter of courtesy and practicality in equal measure. The most legible portion of the earthworks runs along that north-western to north-eastern arc, where the outer bank reaches an external height of over a metre and the flat-bottomed fosse remains clearly defined. The interior offers little reward for the effort of pushing through; the thorn scrub is dense and continuous. What is worth pausing over is the way the outer bank connects into the existing field boundaries at the south-east and north-east corners, extending eastward to meet a north-south boundary line. This kind of integration into later field patterns is common across Ireland, where early medieval enclosures were simply incorporated into the working landscape rather than cleared away, their original purpose long forgotten by the people farming around them.