A ringfort that had survived in some form on the crest of a drumlin in Formil, County Monaghan, long enough to be formally recorded in 1967, had been entirely removed by 2000. What was once a circular earthwork roughly 34 metres across, its interior still covered in grass and fern, its outer bank thick with furze, had disappeared within a single generation.

The 1967 description gives a precise and melancholy picture. The fort sat at the top of an east-facing drumlin slope, those long, smooth hills of glacial till that give so much of Monaghan its rolling, rounded character. A low but legible earthen bank defined the perimeter, standing about half a metre above the interior and a more substantial 1.5 metres on the outer face. Beyond the bank ran a fosse, the shallow ditch typical of ringfort construction, though by 1967 this had already been re-cut and pressed into service as a field drain. The original entrance could not be identified even then. Ringforts, which were the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically had a single gap in their bank serving as a gateway, but this one had already been obscured or modified before anyone recorded it in detail. Within another three decades, the earthwork itself had been levelled entirely, most likely through agricultural improvement of the kind that reshaped so many Irish fields during the late twentieth century.

Formil is a quiet townland and there is nothing to see at the site now. The fort's interest lies less in what can be visited than in what the record preserves: a circle of earth and furze on a glacial hill, its entrance long lost, its fosse already a drain, and its days already numbered when someone first wrote it down.