The ringfort at Boleyboy, on the lower southern slope of Dough Mountain, went entirely unrecorded in cartographic terms until aerial photographs from the 1970s caught the telltale shadow of its circular shape from above. It is the kind of place that reveals itself most clearly at a remove.

A rath, as this type of monument is classified, is a ringfort defined by an earthen bank rather than stone, and was typically used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. The Boleyboy example is modest but legible. The interior measures roughly 22 metres across at its widest, enclosed by an earthen bank that still stands between 0.6 and 0.7 metres on its outer face. Beyond the bank lies a fosse, the term for the surrounding ditch, which survives only along the western to eastern arc of the monument, reaching a depth of around 0.7 metres at its most pronounced point to the north. At the east-south-east, a slight dip of about two metres in the lip of the bank marks where the original entrance once was, narrow and deliberate, oriented toward the slope below. The fosse, the bank, and that small gap together describe a working enclosure, one that would have sheltered a family, their animals, and perhaps a few outbuildings, in a landscape that would have looked very different when it was in use.