No bank, no ditch, no grass-covered ridge betrays anything underfoot. What survives is only a local tradition that somewhere here, about 80 metres south of a neighbouring enclosure, there once stood an earthen fort.

Ringforts, known also as raths, were enclosed farmsteads typically defined by one or more circular earthen banks and ditches, built and occupied mainly during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They were once extraordinarily common across the country, numbering in the tens of thousands, and their disappearance from the physical record is rarely dramatic. Land clearance, ploughing, drainage works, and centuries of agricultural use have quietly levelled many of them until nothing remains above the surface. At Drumbane, even the oral tradition that preserved the memory of the place gives little away beyond the bare fact of its former existence.