In a pasture on a south-facing slope in Egmont, north Cork, the earth has been shaped so subtly that most people would walk across it without registering anything unusual. What they would be crossing is a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, typically built between roughly 500 and 1000 AD, where a family and their livestock lived within a circular bank. Here, the enclosing element is a low scarp, a cut or edge in the ground rather than a built-up wall, rising only about a quarter of a metre, with a fosse, essentially a ditch, running around part of the exterior on the western to north-north-eastern arc to a depth of around 0.7 metres.

The site measures roughly 24 metres east to west and 22.3 metres north to south, making it a modest but coherent enclosure. What makes it particularly interesting from an engineering point of view is the internal shaping. Because the ringfort sits on a slope, whoever built it raised the southern side of the interior to create a roughly level living surface, compensating deliberately for the gradient of the hillside. The structure appeared on the 1937 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured circular raised area with a diameter of around 20 metres, the hachuring being the cartographic shorthand surveyors used to indicate an earthen mound or slight elevation. That the feature was legible enough to map nearly a century ago, and remains visible in pasture today, speaks to the durability of even modest earthworks when left undisturbed by the plough.