At Rathpierce in County Wexford, a large circular earthwork once sat on a south-facing slope, its banks wide enough and prominent enough to be carefully recorded by the Ordnance Survey in 1839. By around 1970, it had been absorbed into the working landscape of a farm complex, and today nothing of it is visible at ground level.

An embanked enclosure of this kind, roughly 50 metres in external diameter, would have been a significant presence on the land. Such enclosures are broadly related to the tradition of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads and settlement sites that were built across Ireland from the early medieval period onward, defined by earthen banks thrown up around a central area. Whether this particular example functioned as a settlement, a stock enclosure, or something older is now difficult to determine, not least because the physical evidence has gone. What the 1839 Ordnance Survey map preserves is a snapshot of a monument that had already survived for centuries, long enough to be considered a fixed and nameable feature of the countryside, sitting on its gentle south-facing slope in Wexford's agricultural interior. The name Rathpierce is itself suggestive, with "rath" being the Irish word for a ringfort or enclosed settlement, hinting that the local memory of the site's character outlasted much of the physical structure.

There is nothing to see at the location today. The site now lies within a farm complex, the earthworks levelled in the decades after the Second World War. Its record on that early Ordnance Survey map is, in a sense, its monument now.