But at Ballyspillane in County Cork, both have been doing quiet archaeological work for centuries, tracing the outline of a ringfort whose earthen banks have long since softened into the surrounding pasture.

A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or place of habitation. The example at Ballyspillane sits on a south-west-facing slope and measures approximately forty metres in diameter. What makes it legible today is largely the persistence of the landscape around it: the western edge of the enclosure is defined by a roadway, while the northern and eastern sides follow a field fence that also marks the townland boundary. These features appear consistently across Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from 1842, 1901, and 1936, suggesting that even as the earthworks themselves degraded, the lines they established were simply absorbed into later patterns of land division. The east-to-south-west section of the circuit, where no road or fence takes over, survives as gentle undulations in the ground, visible in aerial photography as slight but readable traces in the grass.