At Cloonteens in North Cork, a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, has been largely erased from the landscape, yet the land itself still carries faint traces of what stood here more than a thousand years ago. A slight raised scarp, no more than 0.4 metres at its highest point, traces an arc across pasture on a south-westerly facing slope, marking out a roughly circular interior about 26 metres across. The laneway that now cuts straight through the site was once a different thing entirely, curving around the enclosure's edge before being straightened.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site clearly, showing a hachured circular enclosure approximately 25 metres in diameter, with a laneway skirting it from the north-west to the east. Hachured markings on early OS maps were the cartographers' way of indicating an earthwork or raised feature, so the 1842 surveyors plainly saw something worth noting. At some point after that survey, the site was levelled and the laneway realigned to pass directly through it. What once defined the outer boundary of an enclosed farmstead became road fill and flattened ground. The curve in the field fence to the north-east, however, still bends politely around where the enclosure once stood, as though the landscape has not entirely forgotten the arrangement.