Then, in 1983, a farmer levelled it. The reason was practical enough: water pooling in the fosse, the defensive ditch that once ringed the enclosure, was draining downhill and flooding the lower fields. The rath, roughly forty metres in diameter, was smoothed away. What the maps had preserved for generations was gone in a season.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are among the most common early medieval monument types in Ireland, typically the enclosed homesteads of farming families from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They were usually defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and the Aghacross example appears to have been bivallate, meaning it had two concentric rings of banks, a form generally associated with higher-status settlements. That detail only became clear after the levelling, when aerial photography revealed the ghost of both circuits as cropmarks, subtle variations in vegetation growth that betray buried or disturbed ground below. The site sits on level pasture above a south-south-east-facing slope overlooking the Funshion, a position typical of ringfort placement, where defensibility and a view of the surrounding land both mattered. A second ringfort lies roughly seventy metres to the north in the same field, which suggests the area was once a focus of early medieval activity rather than an isolated farmstead.

A low rise is still reportedly visible in the area of the site, a faint reminder of what the maps recorded and the cropmarks confirmed. The landscape around the Funshion valley holds its history quietly, and the pair of enclosures in this field, one still traceable, one flattened for drainage, together say something about how archaeology survives: sometimes in the earth, sometimes only in the air above it.