A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular earthen enclosure built during the early medieval period, typically serving as a farmstead and defended by one or more banks and ditches. At Pallas, the enclosure measured approximately 40 metres in diameter, a fairly typical size, yet what makes this site quietly interesting is precisely its disappearance. The ground has been ploughed flat, and only a low arc of raised earth curving around the south-west side remains to suggest that anything was ever here.

The site appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, recorded in the careful hachured lines that cartographers of the period used to indicate earthworks and enclosures, which means it was still legible in the landscape at that point. By the time the scholar Bowman noted it in 1934, the picture had changed considerably. His account, published that year, recorded three levelled ringforts in the immediate area, on lands then held by John Linehan, Andrew O'Callaghan, and Joseph McCarthy. The Pallas site is thought to be one of these three. Between the mapmakers of the 1840s and the mid-twentieth century, the earthwork had been reduced to tillage ground, its banks broken and scattered by repeated cultivation of the slope. It is a pattern repeated across Ireland, where thousands of such enclosures vanished quietly under the plough across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their presence now recoverable only through old maps, faint ground traces, and records like Bowman's.