In Tomdeely North, County Limerick, a cashel, that is, a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, once occupied a gentle west-facing slope in low-lying pasture. By the time a field surveyor came to document it, all that remained was the memory of the thing, a hollow in the earth and a scatter of dumped stones.

The 1923 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the cashel as a roughly circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately 20 metres, substantial enough to have served as a defended farmstead of the early medieval period, when such enclosures were a common feature of the Irish countryside. The landowner, speaking with surveyor Denis Power, confirmed that the enclosure had been stone built and that it had been removed some years before the site visit. The stones were not carted far. The oval depression left behind, measuring 13.6 metres by 8.7 metres and sinking to a depth of 1.6 metres, was subsequently used as a dump for field stones, the very material that may once have formed the cashel's walls now tipped back into its ghost outline.

The site was recorded and uploaded to the national monuments database in August 2011. Visiting it offers little in the way of visible archaeology; the depression is the only physical indicator that anything was ever here, and even that is easy to overlook amid ordinary farmland. Access would require the landowner's permission, and there is no formal public access or signage. For anyone with an interest in how the archaeological record disappears, quietly and incrementally, through the ordinary business of farming and land clearance, the absence itself is the point. What the 1923 map shows and the ground no longer confirms is a small but legible example of how much has been lost between one century and the next.