The ringfort at Scartlea in County Cork offers none of these things. It has been levelled completely, leaving no visible surface trace on the north-facing slope where it once stood. What survives is essentially a cartographic ghost, a circle drawn on a map made in 1842, measuring roughly 35 metres in diameter, with nothing left on the ground to confirm it ever existed.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths or lioses in Irish, were enclosed farmsteads typically built during the early medieval period, their circular banks and ditches defining a domestic space for a family and their livestock. The Irish word lios, used locally here, carries the same basic meaning. Writing in 1940, the scholar Power noted that there had in fact been two such enclosures in this area, one of them known as Lios na Scoile, meaning roughly the fort of the school, which stood on a farm belonging to a family named Hick. Power recorded it as having been recently destroyed at the time of his writing, suggesting the damage was done sometime in the late 1930s or earlier. Agricultural tillage on the slope seems to have done the rest, erasing whatever earthwork remained.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most detailed cartographic records ever made of the Irish landscape, is now the principal evidence that this site existed at all. The name Lios na Scoile hints at some association with a school or place of learning, though whether that reflects a historical function of the site or simply a local tradition attached to it is no longer possible to say with any certainty.