Most Irish ringforts, the circular enclosed farmsteads that pepper the countryside in their thousands, were built with a single bank and ditch. A site with three banks, known as a trivallate ringfort, tends to signal higher social status, perhaps the enclosure of a more prominent family or a more defensively cautious one. The example at Ballyrobert, sitting in level pasture roughly 400 metres north of the River Bride in County Cork, is roughly 22 metres in diameter, its three banks now much eroded and their intervening ditches, or fosses, heavily silted over the centuries. A roadway clips the southern and western edges; a field fence lined with mature deciduous trees marks the northern and eastern boundary.

The site has not had an easy recent history. Before legal protections could be fully applied, a landowner bulldozed part of the southern defences during the construction of farm buildings. A subsequent excavation, lasting two weeks, was opened to investigate a gap of about 2.8 metres in the eastern portion of the defences, where a slurry pit was proposed. A trench measuring 3 by 4 metres was cut across the break. What it revealed was anticlimactic in one sense: a gravel path of recent date running through the gap, and nothing at all in the way of finds or features connected with the original occupation of the fort. Yet the excavation did confirm the structure of the earthworks themselves. The banks were shown to have been built using dump construction, that is, material simply heaped up rather than carefully laid, and the whole arrangement, triple bank and fosse, was still legible in cross-section despite centuries of weathering and at least one bout of modern damage. The monument is now subject to a preservation order under the National Monuments Acts, which came none too soon given what had already been lost to the bulldozer.