On a south-east-facing slope in upland Tipperary, in an area of open grassland with long views sweeping from south-east through south to west, there is almost nothing left to see. The ground holds only the faintest suggestion of a circular enclosure, roughly 35 metres across east to west, and even that trace requires some effort to read. What you are looking at is an absence shaped like a place.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by an earthen bank and a fosse, the ditch dug to provide material for the bank. This one followed that pattern faithfully. Ordnance Survey field memorandums record a sketch plan drawn in 1954 showing a roughly circular enclosure measuring approximately 150 feet north to south and 158 feet east to west, with a bank and an outer fosse still legible at that point. The measurements place it at the larger end of the ordinary range for such monuments. Sometime around 1965, according to Cahill writing in 1982, the monument was levelled, the bank pushed in, the fosse filled. Agricultural improvement of one kind or another almost certainly accounts for it, as it does for so many similar losses across the Irish uplands.