At the Ben of Fore in County Westmeath, an earthwork was once considered significant enough to be flagged on the county's Record of Monuments and Places, the official mapping of known and potential archaeological sites compiled in 1996. Yet when satellite imagery was examined roughly fifteen to twenty years later, no surface remains of any earthwork could be identified at all. The site sits in a curious administrative limbo: recorded, but unverifiable.

The Ben of Fore sits close to Fore itself, a townland in north Westmeath with a well-documented medieval past, including the ruins of a Benedictine priory and a collection of early Christian remains. An earthwork in this context might have meant anything from a field boundary of medieval origin to the remnants of a ringfort, the circular enclosed farmstead type found across Ireland in enormous numbers and typically dating to the early medieval period. The Westmeath RMP of 1996 treated the site as a potential monument, which is a formal designation acknowledging that something may once have existed there without confirming its nature or survival. By the time aerial and satellite images from 2011 to 2013 were assessed, the landscape offered no visual confirmation of any surviving feature.