Somewhere beneath the pasture on a south-facing slope in County Cork lies what was once a rath, a type of ringfort consisting of a circular earthen bank and ditch enclosing a domestic settlement, typically from the early medieval period. By the time anyone thought to record it carefully, it had already gone. The site survives only as a circle drawn on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a ghost in ink roughly forty metres across, preserving the outline of something that no longer had any physical presence above ground.

Writing in 1923, a researcher named Power noted the situation plainly: the lios, the Irish term for such an enclosure, had disappeared. A second ringfort on the same land, on Gleeson's farm, had fared no better, described as having been "long since improved away." That phrase does a great deal of work. Agricultural improvement throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries removed enormous numbers of earthworks across Ireland, as banks were levelled, ditches filled, and land brought into more productive use. At Ballynanelagh, it happened twice over, two enclosures erased from the same landscape, leaving the slope unbroken and the pasture unmarked. No visible surface trace remains of either.