Today, if you walked out to the field in question, you would find nothing at all. No earthen bank, no ditch, no grassed-over ridge to suggest that anything was ever there.

What the maps recorded was almost certainly a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement monument in the country. These were typically enclosed farmsteads, defined by one or more circular earthen banks and ditches, and built roughly between the sixth and tenth centuries. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one, situated one field south of a neighbouring recorded monument in the same area, had apparently already lost much of its visible form by the time twentieth-century fieldwork was carried out, and no surface trace survives today. Whether it was levelled deliberately for agricultural purposes, or simply eroded over generations, the maps alone now carry the memory of it.