That absence is itself the point. Somewhere in elevated rocky pasture on a slight north-east-facing slope in Briska More, a monument that had survived for well over a thousand years was levelled around the year 2000, leaving the land as smooth and unremarkable as any other grazed hillside in the area.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, typically circular or sub-circular in plan and defined by one or more earthen banks. They are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, with tens of thousands recorded across the country, yet each one represents a household, a family, a working agricultural unit from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. The Briska More example was no small affair. The 1897 Ordnance Survey 25-inch map records it as a sub-circular enclosure with internal dimensions of approximately 39 metres north to south and 37 metres east to west, enclosed by a bank some 8 metres wide, with a maximum external diameter of around 55 metres. That is a substantial monument by any measure. According to the landowner, recorded in the Sites and Monuments Record file, the levelling took place around the year 2000. By the time Fiona Rooney compiled the site record, uploaded in June 2020, there was nothing left to see on the ground.

What makes this site worth noting, paradoxically, is that its outline survived in a different medium. A Google Earth orthoimage taken on 2 July 2018, nearly two decades after the monument was levelled, still captured the ghost of its circular form in the vegetation and soil patterning of the field. A second orthoimage from November 2019 was also recorded. The site lies 118 metres east of the townland boundary with Briska Beg, in rocky elevated ground that would once have offered a commanding position over the surrounding landscape. A visitor going to this location today will find no visible earthworks, no bank, no trace in the turf. The record of this place now exists almost entirely in maps, archive files, and satellite imagery, which is, in its own quiet way, a different kind of monument.