This one in Tullig, County Kerry, nearly didn't. What stands today is essentially a fragment, a section of earthen bank folded into a field boundary on the south to west-northwest side of where the original enclosure once stood, all that remained after the rest was levelled in the mid-1960s.

A ringfort, or rath, is an early medieval enclosed settlement, typically circular, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were once scattered in their thousands across the Irish countryside, and the Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map of 1841 recorded this one at Tullig clearly: a roughly circular area approximately 36 metres in diameter, enclosed by a continuous bank. That map gives a useful baseline, because by the time anyone thought to document the site in any detail, the landowner could confirm that the bulk of it had been bulldozed away within living memory. The surviving bank remnant still carries some presence, rising to about 1.4 metres on the interior face and 1.35 metres on the exterior, sitting on a north-facing slope in pasture, with a farm trackway running along its southwestern edge.

What makes the Tullig site quietly instructive is precisely its incompleteness. The 1841 map shows what was there; the surviving earthwork shows what deliberate clearance leaves behind. The preserved section endures only because it was incorporated into a field boundary, the kind of accidental conservation that has saved fragments of far older landscapes all across Ireland.