On a south-east-facing slope at Clashanimud in County Cork, a ringfort once occupied ground that has since been entirely levelled, leaving no surface trace whatsoever. To the casual eye, there is nothing here at all.

A rath, as this class of monument is also known, was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period. The Clashanimud example was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 as a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter, with a second external bank running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west. That additional bank is a detail worth noting; many ringforts have a single enclosing earthwork, so a second external bank suggests either greater elaboration or some particular need for defence. By the time any modern survey could confirm the site in the field, however, the monument had already been levelled, most likely through agricultural clearance at some point after that 1842 mapping. What the Ordnance Survey cartographers recorded is now the primary evidence that anything stood here at all. To the north-east, a cashel hill fort also survives in the area, a cashel being a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, which gives some sense of how densely this part of Cork was once settled in the early medieval centuries.