In a sense, they would be half right. A later drystone wall has been built directly on top of the bank's eastern arc, folding the ancient into the agricultural in a way that quietly erases one and extends the other.

What lies beneath that wall is a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. Thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of repair, but this one in Farranablake is on the more modest end of the scale. It measures roughly 39 metres east to west and 34 metres north to south, making it a subcircular enclosure of middling size. The defining feature of a rath is its enclosing bank, usually of earth, sometimes with an outer ditch, and here that bank still traces most of the circuit, albeit in a poorly preserved state. H. Knox noted the site as early as 1918, suggesting it was already a recognised landmark in the local landscape by the early twentieth century, even if not a conspicuous one.