Not for a hill, not for a stream, but for an ancient earthwork that has sat in the same field for well over a thousand years. The road curves around the southern edge of a ringfort, and the fact that it does so speaks to a kind of persistent, unspoken respect that the Irish landscape has long shown to these enclosures, even when their original purpose was long forgotten.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks, most commonly built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, as a farmstead or settlement for a single family or small group. The Banemore example is a fairly typical specimen in plan, measuring approximately 44.8 metres north to south and 45.6 metres east to west, which places it in a common size range for single-family enclosures. It sits on a gentle west-facing slope, its interior sloping down gradually towards the south-west and still under pasture. The enclosing bank survives, standing about 1.05 metres high on the outside, though the inner face has worn down considerably to around 0.25 metres. Beyond the bank, on the south-south-east to south-west arc, runs an external fosse, the shallow ditch that would have helped define the boundary and added a degree of protection; here it measures roughly 0.45 metres deep and 1.2 metres wide. Two gaps break the bank, one at the west-south-west measuring four metres across, the other at the south-east at just under three metres, and one of these likely marks the original entrance. The site was recorded by Denis Power and uploaded to the survey record in August 2011.

The fort sits immediately south of the public road, which makes it relatively straightforward to locate from the roadside, though the land itself is private pasture. The earthworks are low and unassuming from a distance, and the kind of visitor who knows what to look for will find the gentle swell of the bank more legible than it first appears, particularly in low winter light when shadows pick out slight changes in ground level. The partial fosse to the south is the most clearly defined feature, and tracing its arc around the exterior gives a reasonable sense of how the original enclosure was organised. The two breaks in the bank reward a closer look, since working out which might have served as the entrance, and which might be a later breach, is a quietly satisfying exercise in reading an old landscape.