That is not a metaphor. The monument was recorded on the 1837 edition of the OS six-inch map as a roughly circular enclosure of about twenty metres in diameter, and then simply absent from the 1913 edition, levelled in the intervening decades with no surviving remains now visible at ground level.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are among the most common early medieval monument types in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular bank and ditch enclosing a domestic settlement dating from roughly the sixth to the tenth centuries. Most survive at least partially. This one, sitting on a gentle south-west-facing slope in poor upland pasture, did not. In its place, a small quarry hole of about ten metres across now occupies part of the site, and the surrounding area is strewn with rubble rocks. Whether the quarrying was the cause of the levelling, or simply followed it, the notes do not say, but the coincidence is suggestive. A monument that was already being mapped and measured in 1837 had been thoroughly erased within a human lifetime.