The one at Lisheen in County Clare is more reluctant. Set on a south-east-facing slope in open pasture, its circular enclosure, roughly forty metres across, has been worn so flat by time and agriculture that the bank and fosse, the external ditch that once ran around it, are no longer legible to someone simply walking the field. What reveals the site is a parch mark, the faint ghostly signature that buried or flattened earthworks leave in dry grass during warm spells, visible in satellite imagery captured between 2011 and 2013.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when defined by earthen banks rather than stone, were the standard form of enclosed farmstead across early medieval Ireland, broadly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Thousands survive in varying states of preservation, but many more exist only as cropmarks or parch marks, legible solely from the air or through remote sensing. The Lisheen example belongs to this quieter category. Its diameter of approximately forty metres is unremarkable by ringfort standards, falling within the typical range for a single-family enclosure of the period. The bank and fosse would originally have defined a clear boundary, offering both a degree of physical protection and, perhaps more importantly, a visible statement of territory and ownership in the early Irish landscape.