This ringfort in Curraghoo More, Co. Cork, a rath being the earthen version of those circular enclosures that served as enclosed homesteads across early medieval Ireland, has been substantially levelled, yet it has not entirely disappeared. Enough survives to read the shape of the original place, if you know what you are looking at.

When the Ordnance Survey mapped this part of North Cork in 1842, the enclosure appeared on the six-inch sheet as a hachured circle roughly twenty-two metres in diameter, a modest but legible ring in the pasture above the River Funshion. By the time the site was examined in detail, the northern half had been absorbed into the local field fence system, the banks pressed into service as boundaries rather than preserved as archaeology. What remains is an arc of earthen bank running from west-northwest to northeast, approximately sixteen metres of it still intact, with an internal height of around 0.6 metres and an external height of one metre. On the western side, where the ground drops away down the slope, the outer face rises to roughly 1.8 metres, the natural gradient lending it a presence the levelled portions no longer have. The bank is stone-faced on its external northern side, a detail that hints at some care in the original construction. The whole thing sits on a break in a west-facing slope, looking out over the Funshion valley, a position that would have given its early medieval occupants both drainage and a clear view of the land below.