At Collinsford, on a slight rise above the Drumcliff River in County Sligo, there was once a ringfort, a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically serving as a defended farmstead. It measured roughly twenty metres in diameter. Today, there is nothing to see. The monument appears to have been levelled, and no surface trace remains at ground level, the whole thing swallowed beneath coniferous forestry planted sometime in the decades before the site was recorded.

What makes the absence meaningful is the paper trail. The ringfort appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, meaning it was a legible feature of the landscape when those surveyors moved through Sligo in the early nineteenth century. It was still recorded as a circular enclosure on the 1913 edition of the same map series. Somewhere between that second mapping and the present day, the earthwork was lost, most likely to agricultural clearance or the ground preparation that precedes commercial forestry planting. The Drumcliff River, just a hundred metres to the north-west, would have made this a practical and well-chosen site for whoever originally built and occupied the enclosure, with water close at hand and a modest elevation offering visibility across the surrounding ground.