Fort, Bunny Beg, Co. Leitrim

A rath is a ringfort, one of the thousands of roughly circular earthwork enclosures built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically serving as a farmstead surrounded by an earthen bank and, often, an outer ditch known as a fosse. What makes this one quietly notable is the documented pace of its fading: within living memory it has gone from a recognisable earthwork to something approaching nothing at all.

The site sits in a col, a low saddle of ground between hills, with drumlins, the smooth elongated ridges of glacial deposit so characteristic of this part of the country, rising to the north-west, north-east, and south-west. Lough McHugh lies roughly 700 metres to the east. When the Ordnance Survey field mapped the site in 1945, the rath was still defined by an earth bank, though no fosse was recorded at that point. By 1991 it had softened considerably: a grass-covered, subcircular area measuring approximately 34 metres north to south and 29.5 metres east to west, with only faint traces of the fosse visible. By 2000, even that subtle profile had eroded away. The landscape has, in effect, reclaimed it.