This one earns its place by having completely disappeared. In a field of rough pasture on a gentle east-facing slope at Moveedy in County Limerick, there is nothing to see, and that absence is precisely the point. A ringfort, or rath, once occupied this ground, a type of circular earthwork enclosure, typically bounded by an earthen bank and ditch, that served as a farmstead or settlement during the early medieval period in Ireland. Thousands of them survive across the country in various states of preservation. This one does not survive at all.

The 1924 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the monument clearly enough: an embanked circular enclosure approximately twenty metres in diameter. It was there on paper, documented, measured, and mapped. But when Denis Power compiled the site record, uploaded in August 2011, there was no trace of it on the ground. Local information filled in the gap. The ringfort was levelled in 1955 during land reclamation, the kind of agricultural improvement work that reshaped considerable areas of Irish countryside in the mid-twentieth century, when earthworks that had stood for perhaps a thousand years were cleared in the space of an afternoon.

There is, in a practical sense, no reason to seek this place out, and yet the record of it exists, which is its own kind of quiet curiosity. The site is in rough pasture and there is nothing to find on inspection. What the notes preserve is the shape of something that was there, the approximate diameter, the slope it sat on, the map that caught it just in time, and the year it was erased. For anyone with an interest in how Ireland's archaeological landscape has been edited, often irreversibly, by the demands of farming and land use, Moveedy offers a stark illustration. The monument is gone, but the knowledge that it was gone, and roughly when and why, was at least considered worth recording.