The one at Toughbaun, in West Cork, tells a different story. Around 1980, the great majority of this enclosure was deliberately levelled, leaving only a single arc of surviving bank to the south-east. That remnant stands to an external height of roughly four metres, its two earthen banks still separated by a fosse, the U-shaped ditch that would originally have run the full circuit of the fort. The fosse has since been planted with conifers and used as a rubbish dump, a fate that makes the site unusual not for what it preserves, but for the candid record it offers of how agricultural improvement and casual neglect have erased so much of Ireland's early medieval landscape.

Ringforts, also known as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or small community. They were constructed from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, their earthen or stone banks providing a degree of security and marking territorial boundaries. The Toughbaun example sits in rolling pasture between two north-east to south-west ridges, to the north of the Saivnose river, a quietly tucked position that reflects the typical ringfort preference for sheltered but workable ground. Beneath the interior, a souterrain survives, one of those narrow, stone-lined underground passages found at many ringforts, likely used for storage or, in times of danger, as a place of concealment.

What remains visible today is largely that overgrown south-eastern arc, its banks swamped in vegetation, the fosse behind it cluttered with the residue of decades of dumping. The souterrain lies somewhere beneath the interior, though its condition and accessibility are unclear. The site sits in ordinary farmland, and the contrast between the functional modern landscape around it and the partially surviving ancient earthwork gives the place a particular quality, less a monument than a trace, caught between erasure and accident of survival.