This square enclosure, with its southern corner jutting slightly outward, appears on a 1775 estate map drawn by B. Scalé for the Duke of Devonshire. The map, now held in a private collection, documents the duke’s holdings across several baronies including Kinalmeaky, East Carbery, Muskerry, Barrets and Barryroe. Today, the site at Castlenalact has been so thoroughly trampled by livestock that the moated structure is no longer visible at ground level, leaving only the faintest of undulations in the earth to hint at its former presence.

The historical map reveals that this wasn’t the only fortified site in the immediate area. About 100 metres to the southwest stands another moated site, slightly larger and still visible today, also marked on Scalé’s careful documentation of the landscape. These earthwork fortifications, typically dating from the Anglo-Norman period, were once common features across the Irish countryside, serving as defended homesteads for colonising families or local lords.

The field containing these archaeological features forms something of an open-air museum of different historical periods. Roughly 170 metres southeast of the lost Danes Fort, visitors can spot the Castlenalact stone row, a much older monument likely dating to the Bronze Age. This juxtaposition of prehistoric ritual stones and medieval defensive earthworks in a single pasture offers a compressed timeline of human occupation in this corner of Cork, though time and agriculture have rendered some chapters more legible than others.