Somewhere beneath a working tillage field on a gentle north-westerly slope in County Cork, a ringfort once stood. A rath, as this type of earthwork enclosure is known, was typically a circular area enclosed by one or more banks and ditches, used as a defended farmstead during early medieval Ireland. This one measured roughly 25 metres across, a fairly modest example of a form that once numbered in the tens of thousands across the island. Today, no surface trace remains.

The site appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a clear circular enclosure, which tells us it was still intact, or at least legible in the landscape, when those surveyors passed through. More precisely, a reference from Healy in 1904 confirms the rath was still standing around the turn of the twentieth century. At some point after that, it was levelled, almost certainly to make the ground more workable for agriculture. The conversion of old earthworks to productive farmland was common throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly as tillage expanded and machinery made it easier to remove what earlier generations had simply farmed around. What the 1842 map recorded as a neat ring in the earth had, within a few decades of that Healy citation, been reduced to nothing detectable above ground.