The one at Kilmannock in County Wexford offers none of that. It exists, as far as current evidence goes, only as a cropmark, a ghostly outline that becomes legible solely from the air, when differences in soil moisture and crop growth trace the buried remains of what was once a substantial enclosed settlement.

What the aerial photographs reveal is a bivallate circular enclosure, meaning one defined by two concentric ditches or banks rather than a single boundary. This double-circuit arrangement is generally associated with higher-status ringforts, the kind that might have housed a prosperous farming family or a minor local lord during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The enclosure at Kilmannock measures a maximum external diameter of around fifty metres, placing it in the middling-to-substantial range for a site of this type. The surrounding landscape is low-lying and level, the sort of ground that would have been agriculturally productive and worth defending or demarcating with some care. Over the centuries, ploughing has gradually erased the physical earthworks, leaving only the differential growth of crops above the buried ditches to betray the outline of what once stood here.