The ringfort at Gneeves in north County Cork is one of them: permission to visit has been refused, meaning that much of what is known about it comes from maps, measurements taken in the field by others decades ago, and a single aerial photograph shot in the summer of 1975. That photograph, taken on the 3rd of July, shows the enclosure still clearly upstanding, a circular earthwork holding its shape in the landscape despite everything the intervening centuries had thrown at it.

The site is a rath, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks with an outer ditch. At Gneeves, there are two such banks, which places it in a category sometimes called a bivallate ringfort, a form generally associated with higher-status occupation. Bowman, writing in 1934 and drawing on measurements recorded in F. Turner's fieldwork, noted banks each standing around five feet high, with a fosse, meaning the external ditch, running nine feet wide and five feet deep. The enclosure itself measures roughly thirty metres in diameter, a figure consistent across the Ordnance Survey maps of 1904 and 1938, both of which show the circular outline with particular care taken on three sides and a hachured fosse to the west. The 1842 six-inch map records it too, confirming the site was already a visible and noted feature well before any formal archaeological survey. Adding considerably to its interest are two souterrains associated with it: souterrains are narrow underground passages or chambers, typically stone-lined, built during the early medieval period and thought to have served for storage or refuge. One lies within the interior of the fort; a second sits on the northern perimeter.

Because access has been refused, there is no practical way to visit the interior of the site. The earthworks may be appreciable from public roads or surrounding land, but the detail of the banks, the depth of the fosse, and the entrances to the souterrains remain, for now, a matter of record rather than direct experience.