At Monaparson in County Cork, a ringfort once occupied a northeast-facing slope in what is now ordinary pastureland. Today there is nothing to see. The earthwork has been levelled completely, leaving no surface trace, and the field carries on as fields do, indifferent to what lies beneath.

The site survives in the cartographic record thanks to the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which recorded it as a circular enclosure roughly forty metres in diameter. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earthen banks and ditches, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its outbuildings. They were built and occupied roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and tens of thousands once dotted the Irish landscape. Many have been lost to agriculture over the centuries, their banks gradually eaten away by ploughing or deliberate clearance, until nothing remains above ground. The Monaparson example appears to be one such casualty. By the time any formal record was made of its condition, it had already gone.