No bank rises from the ground, no ditch catches the eye; the only reason anyone knows it is there at all is a cropmark, the faint differential growth in a planted field that betrays buried archaeology to a camera carried high enough above the earth. An aerial photograph taken in July 1975 captured exactly this: a circular pattern of slightly different vegetation, tracing the outline of what would once have been a raised earthen bank and accompanying fosse, the defensive ditch that typically surrounds these enclosures. Ringforts, also known as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, built broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries as enclosed farmsteads for single family groups.

What makes the Carrigoon More site particularly telling is the paper trail left by the field boundary that once curved around it. Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1905, and 1935 each show an arc of fencing running from the west side of the enclosure round to the north, a line that clearly accommodated the old circular shape rather than cutting across it. Farmers and field-makers had, for at least a century, been working around something whose origins they may not have fully known. By the time the 1975 photograph was taken, that fence was still upstanding and visible from the air. Since then it too has been levelled, leaving only a partial soil mark and no surface trace of the enclosure itself. The site sits in tillage ground now, turned over with each growing season, the ringfort retreating further beneath the plough line.