A ringfort, or rath, once occupied a north-facing slope in this part of north Cork, its circular earthen bank and surrounding fosse, the shallow defensive ditch encircling the enclosure, marking out a diameter of roughly thirty metres. Ringforts are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, associated chiefly with early medieval farming settlements, and thousands once dotted the countryside. This one, however, was ploughed into oblivion long before any serious effort was made to document it. By the time anyone thought to write it down, the land had already swallowed it.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map still shows the enclosure clearly, rendered in the hatched lines surveyors used to indicate earthworks. But by 1934, a researcher named Bowman was recording its fate alongside that of a second fort on the same land, both of them levelled on the property of a Mr Cronin. The fields in which they stood were known locally as Parc a Daingin, an Irish-language name meaning something close to the field of the fortress, a toponym that quietly preserved the memory of what had stood there even as the plough erased the physical evidence. Bowman noted that the ground had been turned over many times and that no signs remained. Aerial photography later caught a ghostly cropmark, a faint variation in vegetation growth caused by the buried remnants of the bank and fosse, but that is the extent of what survives above the subsoil.

A slight rise is still reportedly detectable in the area of the site, the kind of almost-imperceptible undulation that most walkers would pass without a second thought. The Irish place name attached to this field did more to keep the fort alive in the record than any visible feature on the ground.