At Ballynalick in County Tipperary, a site tentatively classified as a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosures that once served as farmsteads and settlement sites across early medieval Ireland, has been entirely erased from the landscape. No embankment survives, no trace of a ditch, and the surrounding field boundaries to the north, west, and south have been levelled along with it. What remains is a large field of maize and an entry in the record noting, with some precision, that no precise location can be given.

The paper trail is thin but telling. In 1963, an Office of Public Works correspondent described the feature as an old tree-ring, a term that suggests the earthwork had already softened into something more botanical than architectural, its banks colonised by trees whose circular outline was all that remained of the original form. It was probably cleared shortly afterwards as part of the Land Project, a mid-twentieth century state scheme that drained, levelled, and reclaimed marginal land across Ireland, in the process removing a considerable number of earthworks that had survived centuries of agricultural change. The ringfort classification at Ballynalick is itself only tentative, inferred from Ordnance Survey six-inch map representations rather than any surviving physical evidence or excavation record.