In a field of reclaimed pasture on a gentle south-facing slope in Coollena, County Roscommon, there is nothing visible at ground level to suggest that anything out of the ordinary ever stood here. Yet two separate editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1837 and again in 1915, both record a circular embanked enclosure roughly 45 metres in external diameter occupying this spot. Locally it was remembered simply as a fort, the kind of earthwork that in the Irish countryside usually refers to a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typical of the early medieval period, defined by one or more raised earthen banks. Sometime in the 1950s, it was levelled.

The removal of ringforts and similar enclosures accelerated across Ireland during the mid-twentieth century, as agricultural improvement schemes and the reclamation of marginal land brought machinery onto ground that had largely been left alone for centuries. Many such sites survived not because they were formally protected but because farmers were reluctant to disturb them, a wariness often bound up with folklore around fairy forts and the misfortune said to follow anyone who interfered with them. In Coollena, that reluctance evidently gave way. The enclosure that appeared consistently on maps spanning nearly eighty years of surveying was gone within a generation, absorbed into the pasture around it.