The ringfort at Cullenhugh, in County Westmeath, is one such case. A ringfort is a roughly circular enclosure, typically defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch called a fosse, used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or small settlement. By the time anyone had formally documented this one, in 1972, it was already in poor shape: a sub-circular area of around eighteen metres east to west, its enclosing bank barely thirty centimetres high and less than four metres wide, its fosse only faintly legible on the eastern, southern, and north-western sides. Cattle had disturbed the interior. It was a monument clinging on by its fingertips.

Somewhere between March 1972 and July 1973, the site was levelled entirely. The exact circumstances are not recorded, but the speed is striking: it was noted in 1972, and by the following year it was gone, described at the time simply as a monument recently levelled. The land it occupied is low-lying wet grassland in the townland of Cullenhugh, with rising undulating ground closing off any wider views from the site. Aerial photography taken in November 2011 confirmed what ground inspection had already suggested: no surface trace remains, and no cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in growing vegetation that sometimes betrays a buried feature to a camera overhead, has appeared either. The fosse, the bank, the enclosed interior, all of it has been absorbed back into the field.