What makes the vanished earthwork at Raheen, in north Cork, quietly anomalous is its shape: the cartographers who surveyed the area for the first Ordnance Survey in 1842 recorded it as triangular, roughly thirty metres on each side, a form that sits outside the usual typology and invites more questions than the surviving evidence can answer.

By the time the Ordnance Survey team passed through, the enclosure was already depicted using hachures, the map convention for an earthwork with visible relief, suggesting it still had some presence in the landscape. But it did not last much longer in legible form. Writing in 1934, a researcher named Bowman noted it as a fort on land then belonging to Denis O'Shaughnessy, observing that it had by then been levelled and appeared to have been triangular. What remains today is a stretch of rough pasture on a gentle south-facing slope, about seventy metres north of the River Allow, with a natural scarp along the southern edge that may preserve, in topographical outline at least, one side of the original enclosure. Whether the triangular form was always intentional, or whether it reflects the constraints of the terrain or a later distortion of a more conventional shape, cannot now be determined with certainty.