In a field to the north of Bettyville, a country house in north County Cork, there is nothing to see at ground level, no earthwork, no shadow in the grass, no tell-tale crop mark visible to the casual eye. Yet on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, something is clearly there: a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter, filled in on the map with a neat cluster of trees.

What exactly that enclosure was remains uncertain. It may have been a ringfort, the type of circular earthwork that dots the Irish countryside in the thousands, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead enclosure. Equally, it may have been something altogether less ancient: a tree ring, a deliberately planted circle of trees laid out as a landscape feature within the demesne of Bettyville house. Country estates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries frequently incorporated such ornamental plantings, and a circular grove would have read on an OS map much as a circular earthwork might. The ambiguity has never been resolved, and the site itself has since been levelled entirely, leaving no surface trace to examine.

There is a particular kind of historical melancholy in a site that was still visible, and recorded, in 1842, and is now simply gone. Whatever stood or grew there, it survived long enough to be mapped, and then disappeared sometime in the century and a half that followed.