The ringfort at Bohard in County Limerick is one such place. What was once a clearly defined circular enclosure, the kind of early medieval farmstead that once dotted the Irish countryside in its tens of thousands, has been reduced by centuries of agricultural pressure to something you could easily walk across without realising what lay underfoot.

A ringfort, or rath, is essentially the remains of an enclosed farmstead, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, where an earthen bank and external ditch provided a degree of security and a clear boundary for a family's living space. At Bohard, the 1841 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records it plainly as an embanked circular enclosure, which suggests it was still reasonably legible to nineteenth-century surveyors. By the time Denis Power compiled the site record, uploaded in August 2011, the picture was considerably less clear. The enclosure measures approximately 36 metres north to south and 39 metres east to west, making it a modest but not unusual example of the type. The enclosing bank, however, has been almost entirely levelled, surviving to only around five centimetres above the interior ground surface and twenty centimetres on the exterior. The external fosse, the ditch that would originally have reinforced the bank, is just twenty-five centimetres deep and a little over two metres wide. A modern field boundary cuts straight across the northern side of the enclosure, and drainage works have further deepened the fosse on that northern edge.

The site sits in level, damp pasture, which goes some way to explaining both the poor survival of the earthworks and the practical agricultural pressures that have worn them down. For anyone visiting, the flatness of the terrain means there is no elevation to help read the landscape, and without a detailed map reference the enclosure is unlikely to announce itself. The most useful approach is to compare the current ground against the 1841 OS mapping, where the monument is clearly plotted. What you are looking for is a very slight depression marking the fosse line and the faintest rise of the old bank, most likely visible as a change in grass growth or soil moisture rather than any obvious topographical feature. The north side, where the field boundary and drainage works have intervened, is the least informative area; the southern and western arcs offer the better chance of reading what remains.