On a steep north-facing hill-slope at Ballynahaha in County Limerick, there is a ringfort that exists, for all practical purposes, only on paper. A ringfort, or rath, is a type of circular earthwork enclosure common across early medieval Ireland, typically formed by one or more banks and ditches and used as a farmstead or place of habitation. This one, however, has been levelled so completely that when the site was inspected, no trace of it could be found in the pasture.

The record of its existence comes from the 1924 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it was depicted as a roughly circular enclosure measuring approximately 25 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west, which would make it a fairly modest example of the type. That depiction is now the sole reliable evidence that anything was ever there. The site was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the record in August 2011, by which point the monument had already been reduced to nothing. Whether it was ploughed out, built over, or simply worn away by agricultural use over the decades between the OS survey and the inspection is not recorded.

For anyone drawn to landscape archaeology or the quieter end of field survey, the site is worth understanding on its own terms. It sits in pasture on a pronounced slope with a northerly aspect, which gives some sense of the original setting even if the earthwork itself is gone. There is nothing to see on the ground, and that is precisely the point; the gap between what the map records and what the land now shows is itself a kind of document. Visiting with a copy of the 1924 OS sheet would let you locate the approximate position and make sense of the terrain, even if the monument it once marked has left no physical trace behind.