Somewhere in the low, marshy fields of County Westmeath, a ringfort once sat on a natural rise of ground, its edges gently scarped and its interior wide enough to pace out at roughly forty-four strides across. A ringfort is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and for centuries this one quietly held its position above the wet ground around it. Then, sometime after 1968, it was levelled as part of land reclamation works, and the site was reduced to nothing a visitor could read from the ground.

The monument had a reasonably legible history before it disappeared. The 1837 Ordnance Survey fair plan map recorded it as a circular enclosure, and a field report prepared by the Office of Public Works in 1968 described an enclosure on a slight natural rise, possibly an esker, which is a long ridge of gravel and sand deposited by meltwater beneath a retreating glacier. There were slight traces of what may have been house foundations within the enclosure, hinting at a farmyard of uncertain age, and some old quarrying around the base of the hillock. The scarp, the deliberately steepened outer edge of the bank, survived to between four and five feet in places, though there was no trace of an external fosse, or ditch, which would normally accompany such a feature. It was an imprecise monument even before it was lost, its outline already soft and ambiguous.

What remains now is documentary. An aerial photograph taken in November 2011 using Digital Globe imagery still shows the outline of the levelled hillock in the landscape, a faint ghost of the rise on which the enclosure once stood. The site is a useful reminder that a great many ringforts recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries no longer survive in any physical sense, absorbed into improved farmland with little ceremony and less notice.