A slight depression running around the northern, north-western, and southern edges of a Kerry pasture grows noticeably lusher than the surrounding field, tracing the ghost of a fosse, the external ditch that once defined a ringfort on a south-facing slope at Glanballyma. Ringforts, roughly circular enclosures built primarily during the early medieval period, were the farmsteads of their age, the bank and ditch marking the boundary of a family's working and living space. Most of what stood here has been levelled over the centuries, but the ground holds the memory of it.

The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, published in 1841, recorded something curious within the interior: a feature marked as a cave, almost certainly indicating the presence of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically used for storage or as a place of refuge. That feature, catalogued separately, sits towards the western side of the enclosure. By the time of the second edition map, produced between 1897 and 1898, the ringfort itself was depicted as a roughly circular area measuring approximately 36 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west, enclosed by a bank and its accompanying ditch. Today, a short surviving stretch of that enclosing bank, reaching an external height of around 2.3 metres, has been absorbed into a field boundary at the south-south-west, which is how a good deal of ancient earthwork material quietly persists in the Irish landscape, folded into the working fabric of farms that came long after. A scarped edge on the western side, about 0.6 metres high, marks where the bank once continued its circuit.