This one at Kilclooney, in North Cork, is a quiet example of just how much a site can absorb before it ceases to be legible. Sitting on a south-facing slope in what is now pasture, it has been used, in part, as somewhere to dump the stones and soil cleared from surrounding fields, a fate that has quietly obscured what was once a deliberately shaped enclosure.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically dating from somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The enclosing element is usually an earthen bank, sometimes accompanied by an outer fosse or ditch, thrown up to define a domestic space and offer a degree of protection for the household within. At Kilclooney, that bank survives as an oval running roughly 26 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west. The internal face of the bank stands only about 0.3 metres high today, while the external face reaches 0.8 metres, suggesting the ground outside the enclosure drops away somewhat, lending the structure what modest presence it retains. Field clearance material has been piled along the north-east to south-west stretch of the bank and spread into part of the interior, which makes reading the original ground surface difficult. It is a common story: the monument endures, but the centuries have layered other purposes on top of it.