At Ballynacarriga in County Cork, a ringfort once stood on a north-west-facing pasture slope, a circular earthwork roughly thirty metres across, and today there is absolutely nothing to see. The site has been levelled completely, leaving no surface trace whatsoever.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They were formed by one or more circular banks of earth and ditches, enclosing a domestic area where a family and their animals would have lived. The Ballynacarriga example was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 as a clearly defined circular enclosure, meaning that at the time of the first systematic mapping of Ireland, it was still legible in the landscape. At some point between that survey and the present day, agricultural activity erased it entirely. What makes this particular site a little more curious is that another ringfort survives approximately forty metres to the south-west, which means the two once formed a pair of neighbouring enclosures on the same slope. That surviving companion site makes the loss of this one slightly easier to imagine, offering a rough sense of the scale and character that the vanished enclosure would once have had.