This one offers nothing of the sort. On the south bank of the Laney stream in Carrigthomas, in rough grazing land interrupted by rock outcrop, there is said to be a ringfort, a rath, that has left no visible surface trace whatsoever. What makes it stranger still is that the tradition attached to it includes a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind often built within or beside early medieval ringforts, possibly for storage or refuge. Underneath the unremarkable pasture, something may yet remain.

The site comes to attention through a single recorded conversation. In 1939, a local landowner named John Goggin told a researcher called Hartnett that his land contained the remnants of what he referred to as a lisheen, a diminutive Irish term for a small fort or enclosure, often used in local speech to describe a ringfort in a reduced or ruined state. Goggin specifically mentioned a subterranean passage associated with it. Ringforts, which were the enclosed homesteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, were built in enormous numbers across the country, and many have been levelled by centuries of agriculture. The survival of folk memory about a site, even when the physical remains have vanished, is itself a kind of record, a thread connecting a field in Mid Cork to a pattern of settlement stretching back well over a thousand years.

There is nothing for a visitor to see here in any conventional sense. The land is private, the earthworks gone, and the souterrain, if it exists, is entirely below ground. What lingers is the account itself, one man's knowledge of his own land passed on in 1939, preserved in print, and still unverified.