At Ballyherkin in County Cork, a south-facing slope holds no earthwork, no ditch, no raised bank, nothing a walker would pause over. Yet maps record what was once there: a rath, a type of circular earthen enclosure typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, that would have served as a farmstead or defended settlement for a local family of some standing.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842 recorded the enclosure clearly, showing a roughly circular form approximately fifty metres in diameter. That is a reasonably substantial structure, large enough to have enclosed a house, outbuildings, and perhaps a small yard within its banks. Sometime in 1934, it was levelled, leaving no visible surface trace. The act itself was not unusual for the period; ringforts across Ireland were cleared in great numbers through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as farmland was consolidated or improved, their banks seen as obstacles rather than as the remains of a settlement perhaps fifteen hundred years old.