The one at Glanturkin, on a south-east-facing slope above Gyleen Bay in County Cork, complicates that picture. When it was excavated by O'Flaherty ahead of its levelling, no evidence of occupation turned up at all. What the dig did reveal pointed instead to a cattle corral, a space for enclosing animals rather than people.

The enclosure is modest in scale, roughly 35 metres across at its widest, with a bank reaching up to 2 metres in height, though that bank had been heavily worn down on its northern side by the time excavation took place. Beneath it, the builders had used re-deposited boulder clay to raise the earthwork, and there was an external fosse, a defensive ditch running around the outside, which is a standard enough feature in ringfort construction but sits slightly oddly alongside a structure apparently intended for livestock management rather than human protection. Inside, a partially stone-lined drain was also uncovered. The site sits within agricultural land that was under tillage, on a slope overlooking the bay, which gives some sense of why enclosing cattle here might once have made practical sense. Writing in 1940, a scholar named Power noted that there had been at least five such enclosures, known locally as lioses, in the surrounding area, of which three had already been flattened by his time. The Glanturkin example was itself levelled after O'Flaherty's 1982 excavation documented it.