Beneath that overgrowth, however, lies the earthwork signature of an early medieval ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that once dotted the Irish countryside in its thousands. What makes this particular example quietly arresting is precisely how thoroughly the vegetation has reclaimed it, transforming a piece of lived-in landscape into something that looks, from a distance, like a natural copse.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths when formed from earthen banks rather than stone, were the standard unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. A farming family would enclose their homestead within a circular bank and ditch, as much for the demarcation of property and the penning of livestock as for any serious defensive purpose. The example at Flean More follows this pattern closely. According to the survey compiled by Denis Power, the enclosure is roughly circular with a north to south diameter of approximately twenty-eight metres. The earthen bank survives to an internal height of around one metre and a slightly greater external height of just over a metre, with an external fosse, or ditch, running from the east around to the north, measuring about three metres wide and thirty centimetres deep. Field boundaries have grown up against the enclosure on the northern, south-eastern, and south-western sides, suggesting that later agricultural activity worked around it rather than through it.

The site sits in pasture on a gentle north-east facing slope, and the interior itself slopes down gradually toward the north. Access would be through working farmland, so any visit should be arranged with the relevant landowner. The dense overgrowth that covers the enclosure means the earthworks are more easily appreciated from a short distance than from within the thicket itself. Walking the outer edge, where the bank and the remnant ditch are most legible, gives the clearest sense of the original form. The field boundaries pressing in from three sides are worth noting too, a small record of how successive generations of farming quietly shaped themselves around something they neither fully understood nor entirely ignored.