The map they produced, part of the celebrated six-inch series that documented Ireland's landscape in extraordinary detail, shows a hachured circular enclosure roughly 40 metres in diameter. Today, the ground offers nothing to confirm it was ever there.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular earthen bank and ditch enclosing a domestic space used by farming families, probably between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the country, many still prominent in the landscape. The one at Farranbrien does not. At some point between its depiction on the 1842 map and the present, it was levelled, almost certainly through agricultural improvement or land clearance, the kind of incremental, undramatic destruction that has claimed a significant portion of Ireland's earthwork heritage. The hilltop location it once occupied is itself suggestive; raths were frequently sited on elevated ground, commanding views of the surrounding farmland their occupants worked and watched over.

There is nothing for a visitor to see here now. The site survives only in cartographic memory, a faint ghost preserved in the lines of a nineteenth-century map rather than in the earth itself.