That, in a way, is precisely the point. Somewhere beneath a stretch of pasture on a gentle north-west-facing slope in Ballyroe, County Cork, lies what was once a circular enclosure, the kind of earthwork that appears throughout the Irish landscape as a ringfort or rath, typically the enclosed farmstead of an early medieval family. This one is gone, levelled during the 1970s, and the ground gives no indication it was ever there.

What makes the loss traceable, if not reversible, is the documentary record left by two different moments of Ordnance Survey mapping. On the 1842 six-inch map, the feature appears as a hachured circular enclosure, the small radiating lines used by surveyors to suggest an earthen bank or raised edge, with a diameter of roughly fifteen metres. Nearly a century later, the 1936 edition of the same map scale shows it again, this time described as a hachured circular mound or raised area, though by then somewhat reduced in apparent diameter to around ten metres. Something had already changed between those two surveys, whether through agricultural pressure, natural settling, or both. Local information confirms that whatever survived into the twentieth century was removed entirely in the 1970s, a fate shared by a considerable number of similar earthworks across Ireland during a period of intensive land improvement and field consolidation.