At Skahanagh in County Cork, a rath once occupied a north-west-facing slope in what is now open pasture. Its circular outline, roughly twenty metres across, was still legible enough to be mapped on the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet of 1842, but today there is nothing left to see at ground level. The earthwork has been levelled completely, absorbed back into the farming landscape.

Ringforts, or raths, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. What makes the Skahanagh site particularly interesting is the context in which it once sat. Writing in 1923, a researcher named Power recorded that the Ordnance Memoir for the area had noted four such lioses, an older Irish term for ringforts, in the immediate vicinity. Three of those were described as still surviving at the time Power was writing. Two had ramparts standing five feet high; the third was notably large, with a rampart reaching nine feet. There were also two further ringforts in the area that the Ordnance surveyors had not recorded at all, and of which, even then, no trace remained. The site now mapped at Skahanagh falls into that category of complete loss, a place that outlasted some of its neighbours in documentary record but not in physical form.

The cluster of lioses described by Power suggests this corner of east Cork was once a fairly densely settled landscape, with multiple enclosed farmsteads operating within close range of one another. Whether any of the surviving examples Power mentioned in 1923 are themselves still intact is another question; the one at Skahanagh, at least, offers nothing to the eye of a visitor walking the pasture today.