The one at Sheefin in County Westmeath has not been so fortunate. Sitting on the south-east facing slope of a prominent hill, it was once a commanding presence with open views stretching from north-east to south-west. Now it has been almost completely levelled, and what remains is largely a matter of careful measurement rather than visual impression.

A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland most commonly as a farmstead and the focus of a family's domestic and agricultural life. At Sheefin, the enclosure is sub-circular, measuring approximately 36 metres north to south and 41 metres east to west. It was defined by two very low, broad banks with an intervening fosse, the term for a ditch or trench cut into the ground, as well as an external fosse beyond the outer bank. The interior slopes gently from north-west to south-east. A field fence, constructed sometime after 1837, cuts across the north-east section of the perimeter, and the southern edge of the monument has been quarried away entirely. By the time aerial photography captured the site in November 2011, the whole area had been absorbed into a coniferous forestry plantation, which further obscures what little earthwork survives at ground level.

The site sits below higher ground to the north-west, which means that whoever originally built here chose a position with prospect rather than full topographic dominance. That small detail is one of the few things the levelled earthworks can still suggest about the intentions of the people who once enclosed this particular patch of a Westmeath hillside.