The pasture at Farahy, Co. Cork, on a gentle south-facing rise, gives no indication that anything lies beneath or ever stood above it. No earthwork survives, no trace of a bank or ditch. Whatever was once here has been levelled flat into the grass.

What was once here, at least according to Ordnance Survey mapping spanning nearly a century, was a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically built during the early medieval period. These were usually circular or roughly circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and they served as the dwelling places of farming families across Ireland for several centuries. The Farahy example appeared on the six-inch OS maps of 1842, 1905, and 1936, each time drawn as a hachured circular enclosure of approximately forty metres in diameter. Hachuring was the cartographic convention used to indicate raised earthworks, so successive surveyors, across nearly a hundred years, were still recording something worth marking. At some point between 1936 and the present, agricultural activity levelled the site completely.