In a low-lying patch of poorly-drained pasture on a gentle south-west-facing slope in Cloonagleavragh, County Sligo, there once stood a ringfort, and today there is nothing whatsoever to see. The site has been levelled, leaving no trace at ground level, which makes it a peculiar kind of historical footnote: a place whose significance lies almost entirely in the fact that it is gone.

A rath is an early medieval circular enclosure, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, used as a farmstead and the basic unit of rural settlement across Ireland for centuries. The Cloonagleavragh example was modest by any measure, with a diameter of approximately 22 metres. What is quietly telling about this site is its cartographic history. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, suggesting it was already sufficiently degraded by that point to escape the surveyors' notice, yet it was recorded as a circular enclosure on the revised six-inch map of 1913. Somewhere between those two surveys it was visible enough to document, and sometime after, it was gone entirely. The landscape closed over it without ceremony.