The ringfort at Lackaleigh in north County Cork is one of these. What was once a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter, defined by a bank and an outer fosse (a defensive ditch ringing the perimeter), has been levelled to the point where nothing obvious remains at ground level. Its existence became known through a cropmark recorded in an aerial photograph taken in May 1977, in which the buried ditch and bank left differential marks in the vegetation above them, briefly legible from altitude.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they were earthen constructions, were the standard form of enclosed farmstead across early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, but many more have been lost to centuries of agriculture. The Lackaleigh example belongs firmly in this latter category. What makes its situation quietly notable is the density of settlement it implies in this stretch of north Cork. Two further ringforts lie within a few hundred metres, one approximately ninety metres to the north-west and another around two hundred and sixty metres to the north-east, suggesting that this was once a moderately populated farming landscape, with adjacent family or community enclosures arranged across the terrain in a pattern now only recoverable through fieldwork and aerial survey.