Ringfort (Rath), Cavanaquill, Co. Cavan

That is, in a sense, the whole point. Somewhere on the slope of a drumlin hill in County Cavan, a ringfort once occupied a patch of slightly elevated ground, and today it has vanished so completely that it leaves no trace at ground level. The site is not obscured by vegetation or hidden beneath a later building. It was simply removed.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed homestead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches surrounding a domestic area. They are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, numbering in the tens of thousands, and their survival in the landscape is generally owed to the difficulty of clearing them and, in many cases, to folklore that discouraged interference. The rath at Cavanaquill was recorded as a going concern on the Ordnance Survey maps of both 1836 and 1876, marked plainly as "Fort" on each edition, sitting on the characteristic rounded ridge of a drumlin, the glacier-deposited hills that give this part of Cavan its rolling, hummocked character. Sometime in the early 1960s, during a land reclamation scheme, it was levelled. The earthworks were cleared, the ground was flattened, and the enclosure that had endured for perhaps a thousand years was gone within a season.