At Garrymore in County Wicklow, a ringfort of roughly thirty metres in diameter sits, technically speaking, on a gentle south-east-facing slope, yet there is nothing to see there now and nobody locally who remembers it. It exists chiefly as a circle drawn on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, a cartographic ghost of a settlement that has otherwise dissolved back into the ground.

Ringforts, known also as raths or cashels depending on whether they were built of earth or stone, were the most common form of rural enclosure in early medieval Ireland, typically used as farmsteads and dating broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Tens of thousands were built across the country, and many have vanished entirely through centuries of agriculture, land improvement, and simple neglect. The Garrymore example was clearly visible enough to the OS surveyors in the 1830s to be recorded on their maps, but at some point between that survey and the present day it ceased to leave any impression on the landscape or on local memory. Its diameter of around thirty metres places it in the smaller range of such enclosures, suggesting a modest farmstead rather than anything of high status. That the slope faces south-east is one of the few things that can still be said about it with any confidence, a detail that speaks to the practical logic of early medieval farmers choosing ground that caught the morning light and drained well.