In the damp south-western corner of a field, on a south-facing slope, the ground gives nothing away. No earthen bank, no ditch, no raised outline catches the eye or the foot. Whatever was once here has been absorbed so completely into the surrounding farmland that a visitor standing on the spot would have no reason to pause.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earthen banks, were the most common type of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its associated outbuildings within a circular raised boundary. They were built in their thousands, and many have survived well enough to read in the landscape. This one, however, is known only because the Ordnance Survey recorded it in 1842, mapping it as a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter. That six-inch map, one of the most detailed surveys of Irish terrain ever undertaken in the nineteenth century, caught the site at a moment when some trace was still legible. At some point between that survey and the present, whatever remained on the surface disappeared.