On a gentle rise in the undulating grassland of County Westmeath, a ringfort once stood, its oval earthwork substantial enough to be carefully mapped in 1837. Today, not a trace of it remains above ground, and the field gives nothing away.

Ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, were typically formed by one or more circular banks of earth or stone enclosing a domestic space. They were built in their thousands across the island, and they were also destroyed in their thousands, particularly during the agricultural improvements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when landowners cleared earthworks to consolidate and extend tillage and pasture. The Parsonstown fort appears to have met its end during precisely this period. The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map shows the feature clearly, a small oval earthwork annotated simply as "fort". By the time the revised six-inch Ordnance Survey edition was produced in 1875, the notation had changed to "Site of Fort", the past tense of cartography, indicating that the monument had been levelled in the intervening thirty-eight years. What survives now is the record of its existence, not the thing itself.