It sits atop a hill in pasture, but nothing visible remains at ground level; no earthen bank, no ditch, no trace of the circular enclosure that once defined it. What we know of it comes almost entirely from a single source: the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1842, which recorded it as a circular enclosure before whatever remained of it vanished into the farming landscape.

Ringforts, known variously as raths or cashels depending on whether they were built from earth or stone, are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, with estimates of around 40,000 or more once scattered across the island. They were primarily farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD, with the enclosing bank and ditch serving as a boundary marker and modest defensive feature for a family and their livestock. The one at Kealties would have been unremarkable in its time, one among many on the Cork landscape. What makes it quietly notable now is precisely its absence. The 1842 map caught it at some late stage of survival, and somewhere between that survey and the present day it was levelled entirely, ploughed or grazed or simply allowed to erode until the hill gave nothing away.