This one in Ballyvalloo, County Wexford, is visible only from the air, and even then only under the right conditions. A circular cropmark roughly 33 metres in diameter, probably the ghost of a single enclosing bank, shows up on aerial photographs when differential growth in whatever crop or grass happens to be growing above it betrays the buried outline beneath. It is, in other words, a site that exists more as a pattern than as a place you can stand inside and recognise.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths when they were earthen rather than stone, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. They usually consisted of one or more circular banks and ditches surrounding a domestic area, and tens of thousands of them survive across the country in varying states of preservation. The Ballyvalloo example sits on a slight rise in an undulating landscape, which would have been a typical choice of ground, offering modest visibility and drainage. When archaeological testing was carried out in 2003 by McCarthy, at a point approximately 50 metres to the north-west of the site, no archaeological material came to light. That result does not dismiss the site, but it does leave the question of what the enclosure was, and when it was made, without a firm answer. The cropmark suggests something is there; the testing, at least at that remove, offered nothing to confirm what.