This one in Bannagh, County Cork, asks for rather more than that. A ringfort once occupied the top of a hill here, a circular earthen enclosure of roughly 28 metres across, and today there is absolutely nothing to see. The field has been ploughed flat. No bank, no ditch, no shadow in the grass at the right angle of evening light. The site exists now only in maps and a handful of written lines.

Ringforts, also called raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular interior enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were used as farmsteads, and thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. The one at Bannagh does not survive at all. Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1904, and 1938 each show it as a hachured circular enclosure, the standard cartographic shorthand for an earthen mound or bank, confirming that it was still physically present well into the twentieth century. A more detailed picture comes from a record made by Bowman in 1934, which noted a single-ramparted fort of roughly 33 yards in diameter on land belonging to a Mrs O'Callaghan. The bank stood about four feet high at that point, and the interior of the enclosure sat approximately two feet above the level of the surrounding field, a modest but measurable rise that would have given the occupants a slight commanding view of the surrounding land. At some point after 1938, the decision was made to level it entirely for tillage.