Somewhere beneath a pasture on a south-west-facing slope in Mid Cork, a ringfort once stood, roughly thirty-five metres across, its earthen banks enclosing the kind of defended farmstead that thousands of early medieval Irish families called home. Today it has been levelled so completely that no surface trace remains.

A ringfort, or rath, was typically a circular enclosure formed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a domestic settlement from roughly the early Christian period through to the Norman arrival and beyond. The Gortnalicky example was recorded on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in 1842, 1903, and again in 1940, each time rendered as a hachured circle, the conventional cartographic shorthand for an earthwork enclosure. That it appears across three separate surveys spanning nearly a century suggests it was still legible as an earthwork well into the twentieth century, which makes its subsequent disappearance all the more complete. At some point between the mid-twentieth century and the present, agricultural activity smoothed it away entirely.