The ground above it is pasture, the slope faces north-north-west, and there is nothing left to see. No bank, no ditch, no trace. It is, in the language of field archaeology, levelled, which means the gradual work of centuries of farming has brought it down to the same level as everything around it. What remains is a location, a set of coordinates, and a record.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular earthen bank enclosing a farmstead or homestead. The one at Barrafohona appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 as a circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately twenty-five metres, modest even by the standards of the type. At some point between that survey and the present, the earthworks were removed entirely. Roughly 140 metres to the north-west lies a separate rectangular enclosure, a different form and perhaps a different period, suggesting that this particular patch of Cork countryside was used and reused across a long span of time.

What the site retains, at least, is its outlook. The slope commands a view across to the Nagle Mountains to the north, and on a clear day the Galtees and the Knockmealdown Mountains are visible further off. Whoever built and lived within that small circular enclosure more than a thousand years ago would have looked out across the same ridgelines. The fort is gone, but the view it was positioned to overlook has not changed at all.