It was an accidental reminder that what looks like a grassy mound in a Kerry pasture can conceal far more than it reveals.

The ringfort, or rath, a type of enclosed settlement built in Ireland roughly between the third and tenth centuries, sits on a low hillock in Carhoonahone, a short distance east of a tributary of the Gaddagh river. It is bivallate, meaning it has two concentric earthen banks rather than one, which sets it apart from the majority of Irish ringforts and suggests its occupants either had greater resources or greater need for defence. The inner bank is particularly substantial, reaching 4 metres in height at the south-east and up to 8 metres in width, with a stepped outer flank visible along the northern and western sides. The outer bank, better preserved to the south and west, averages 1.8 metres in external height. There is no surviving trace of a fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies such banks, though that absence may simply reflect centuries of silting and settlement. A gap of 2.3 metres in the north-east, where some stone facing also appears, might be the original entrance, though this remains uncertain. The interior measures roughly 27.8 metres north to south and 25 metres east to west, and is level underfoot. The site may correspond to a place recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books as Lissdooil, from the Irish Lios Dúill, a name documented by scholar Ó Cíobháin in 1978, which would give it a linguistic identity stretching back at least to the nineteenth century, and almost certainly much further.