But the slight humps and dips in the ground at Ballyhoolahan represent something quite deliberate: a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, built during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead for a family of some local standing. This particular example is circular in plan, measuring roughly 37.8 metres north to south and 36.2 metres east to west, and sits on a south-facing slope, an orientation that would have made practical sense for both shelter and light.

The structure follows the typical anatomy of a rath, the earthen variety of ringfort. At its centre is the slightly sunken interior, enclosed first by a grass-covered scarp rising about half a metre, with a faint internal lip, then an intervening fosse, which is a rock-cut or earthen ditch, and finally an outer earthen bank reaching a maximum height of 1.75 metres. Beyond that, a second external fosse survives as no more than a slight depression in the ground. Two concentric ditches would have made this a reasonably well-defended enclosure by early medieval standards. A gap of about 2.5 metres in the bank to the south-west marks what was almost certainly the original entrance. Inside, a family would have kept their livestock and lived in timber or wattle structures that have long since vanished, leaving the earthworks as the only lasting trace of their presence.