At Ballyglissane in County Cork, a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that tens of thousands of early medieval Irish families once called home, was levelled around 1973. What had likely stood for over a thousand years was gone within a single farming season.

A rath, as this type of ringfort is commonly known, would originally have consisted of a roughly circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks, with a ditch outside, the whole thing serving as a defended farmstead for a family of some local standing during the early medieval period, roughly between 500 and 1000 AD. At Ballyglissane, local information recorded a circular enclosure of about 30 metres in diameter, bounded by an earthen bank that stood approximately one metre high. That modest bank was sufficient to survive in the landscape long enough to be documented, even if the site itself had already been cleared. It sat on a north-west facing slope, in pasture, the kind of quiet agricultural setting where ringforts once went largely unnoticed until they were ploughed or bulldozed away.

The outline of the bank was still visible as a low undulation in the ground, which means that for an observant visitor willing to read the land carefully, the ghost of the enclosure may yet be traceable underfoot, a shallow ripple in the grass where a circular boundary once stood firm.