This one in Garraree, County Westmeath, makes no such gesture. What was once a substantial circular earthwork, a ringfort of the kind that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland and served as enclosed farmsteads for early medieval families, has been so thoroughly levelled by centuries of agriculture that it now exists primarily as a faint smudge on an aerial photograph. The image in question, taken by Digital Globe in November 2011, captures just enough of a crop mark in the soil to confirm that something was once here, the ghost of a boundary that the earth has not quite forgotten.

The site sits on the lower south-facing slope of a high ridge in hilly grassland, with a second ringfort surviving about 90 metres to the north-east. When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1837, the earthwork was still legible enough to be recorded on the Fair Plan map as a circular shaped feature annotated simply as a fort. By 1970, things had deteriorated considerably. A survey that year found only a scarp remaining, with approximate dimensions of 39 metres in the north-west to south-east direction and 47 metres north-east to south-west, sloping gradually southward. A field fence running north-west to south-east had been driven across the north-eastern quadrant of the site, dividing what little remained. Between the fence line, the plough, and time itself, the structure was effectively gone.