The one at Tomhaggard in south Co. Wexford breaks that logic in a small but nagging way. Here, the internal bank is subcircular as expected, but the outer fosse, the defensive or drainage ditch encircling it, is distinctly subrectangular, running to approximately 40 metres east to west and between 35 and 45 metres north to south. That mismatch between an oval bank and a roughly rectangular outer ditch is unusual enough that it gives archaeologists pause, even as they conclude that the site is, in all probability, a ringfort nonetheless.

The enclosure first appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, recorded at that time as a circular embanked feature with an external diameter of around 35 metres. Since then, much of what is known about its shape has come not from excavation but from aerial photography, which reveals cropmarks, the subtle variations in crop growth above buried or disturbed soil that betray the outline of old earthworks to a camera looking straight down. Those photographs show the full geometry of the bank and fosse that is largely invisible at ground level. The site sits on a fairly level landscape, and today, in a ploughed field, it survives as a low-relief and indistinct surface feature, the kind of thing that registers more as a vague unease in the eye than as anything you could confidently point to and name.