Somewhere beneath a pasture on an east-facing slope in County Waterford lies an early medieval ringfort that has effectively vanished from view. Not ruined, not overgrown, simply gone from sight: the earthworks that once defined this enclosure have been levelled to the point where nothing is visible at ground level. What survives does so only in the historical record and, somewhere below the turf, in the soil itself.

Ringforts, which are roughly circular enclosures defined by one or more banks and ditches, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, used as farmsteads and as expressions of status by their occupants. This particular example at Ballynaguilkee was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1840, where it appears as an embanked enclosure with an external diameter of approximately 55 to 60 metres. That is a reasonably substantial size, towards the larger end of what is commonly found across the Irish landscape, though without excavation little more can be said about who built it or when it was in use. By the time any modern observer might go looking, the banks had already been reduced to nothing detectable from the surface.