Somewhere on a gently south-facing slope just north of a deeply cut stream valley in north Cork, a ringfort, the kind of circular earthwork enclosure built in early medieval Ireland, once stood with roughly half its bank still intact. Then, in the early 1980s, the fort was levelled. The land went to tillage, the field boundaries were cleared, and the enclosure that had survived for perhaps a thousand years or more disappeared within a generation.

The site was recorded by Bowman in 1934, who described a single-ramparted fort of around 41 yards in diameter, situated in a glen on land belonging to a Mr Power. At that point, about half the circuit of the bank was still standing, to a height of roughly four feet. Bowman also noted the possibility of a church at the centre of the enclosure, which, if accurate, would suggest the site had both secular and ecclesiastical significance at some point in its history. The surrounding area was evidently a busy one in earlier centuries: a horizontal water-mill, a type of simple mill driven directly by a wheel turned flat in a watercourse rather than vertically, stood a short distance to the west, and a possible burial ground lay in the adjoining field to the northwest. Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1905, and 1937 all show a roughly semicircular field running about 80 metres east to west and projecting some 50 metres to the south, and the curve of a field fence in the eastern corner, along with a kink in a boundary to the north, suggest that the fort's bank was at some point incorporated into the field system rather than removed. That accommodation lasted until it did not.

What remains today is a palimpsest legible only in the map record and in the slight logic of field shapes that no longer exist. The enclosure at Kilbarry is a small, specific example of how quickly a landscape feature that outlasted dynasties and plantations can be erased once it becomes an inconvenience to a plough.