Visit the same spot today and you will find a cattle yard. The ringfort, which locals knew simply as "the fort", is gone.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular or subcircular area enclosed by an earthen bank and, beyond that, a fosse, which is the technical term for a surrounding ditch. They date predominantly from the early medieval period and are thought to have served as enclosed farmsteads. The example at Cappaganneen followed this pattern closely: the landowner recalls that before the site was levelled, it was defined by just such a bank and external fosse. The cattle yard that replaced it was constructed roughly twenty years before the site was recorded in A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press. That survey catalogued the site, but by then the physical remains had already been lost to agricultural development.

What makes this particular record quietly melancholy is not simply that the monument is gone, but that its disappearance was recent enough for living memory to carry the details. The shape of the bank, the presence of the fosse, the local name: these survived only because someone remembered them.