Somewhere in a tilled field on a gently south-east-facing slope in north Cork, a circular enclosure once stood. It measured roughly seventeen metres in diameter, and at some point before living memory it was levelled completely, leaving no visible trace on the ground.

The only record of its shape comes from the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where it was marked as a hachured circular enclosure, the cartographers' convention for indicating a raised or embanked feature. At that time it lay approximately thirty metres to the west of a stream, a detail that hints at the practical logic common to early enclosures, many of which were ringforts, a type of enclosed farmstead built mainly between the sixth and tenth centuries and once so numerous across Ireland that tens of thousands of examples have been recorded. Whether this particular enclosure was a ringfort, or something older or different in function, the notes do not say. What is clear is that it survived long enough to be mapped in the nineteenth century, and was gone, or going, not long after.