The ringfort at Laughil in County Longford belongs to that category. When surveyors visited and documented it in 1976, they found a raised subcircular area roughly 23 metres across at its widest, enclosed by a low bank of earth and stone. Even then, the southern and western stretches of that bank had been absorbed into ordinary field boundaries, the original entrance was no longer identifiable, and quarrying, both at the northwestern edge and apparently to the south, had eaten into whatever context once surrounded it. Since that visit, the rath has been levelled completely and is no longer visible at ground level.

A rath is the Irish term for a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement in the country, typically consisting of a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks, often with an outer ditch or fosse. The Laughil example was notable for the absence of any fosse, which was unusual, and for its relatively modest scale. What makes its pre-1976 obscurity equally striking is that it appeared on neither the 1837 nor the 1883 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard cartographic record of the Irish landscape for much of the nineteenth century. A feature of this kind would ordinarily have been captured by those surveys if it were clearly legible in the terrain at the time. Its omission suggests the earthwork may already have been substantially reduced by the mid-nineteenth century, gradually merging with the working agricultural landscape around it until the two became indistinguishable.