What the surveyors recorded in Parsonstown, County Westmeath, was a circular enclosure of the kind known as a rath or ringfort, an earthwork monument typically consisting of a raised bank and ditch enclosing a domestic or defensive space used during the early medieval period. By the time later editions of the six-inch maps were produced, that enclosure had vanished from the cartographic record entirely, and today a modern bungalow occupies the site.

The 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map is the key document here. It shows the circular outline clearly enough to be recorded and classified, but no subsequent edition of the same map series repeats it. The implication is straightforward: at some point between the first survey and the revisions that followed, the physical remains were levelled or built over, leaving the 1837 sheet as the only surviving evidence that a ringfort ever stood here. Thousands of such monuments were lost across Ireland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as land was improved, boundaries redrawn, and new buildings put up. This particular site in Parsonstown simply follows that pattern, with a bungalow now occupying ground that the early surveyors found worth noting.