The ringfort at Keale in County Cork was known as Lisín Maol, which translates roughly as "bare little fort", and bare is precisely what it remains. The earthwork has been levelled entirely, leaving no visible trace on the surface of the rough grazing land where it once sat atop a low hillock. What survives is essentially a name, a measurement, and a memory pressed into cartographic paper.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more circular earthen banks and ditches. They are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, yet individually they vary enormously in scale and survival. This one was a single-ramparted example, modest in size, recorded by Bowman in 1934 as measuring roughly 37 yards in diameter and situated on land belonging to a J. Dennehy. By that point it had already been levelled. Earlier evidence comes from the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which shows the enclosure as a hachured circle, the conventional cartographic shorthand for an earthwork, with a diameter of approximately 28 metres. The slight discrepancy between the two measurements may reflect different methods of recording, or simply the imprecision inevitable when surveying a feature already in decline.

There is nothing to see at Keale today, which is in its own way the point. The hillock is still there, the grazing land still rough, and the Irish name still carries the site's entire biography in three words.