One of them, the eastern of the pair, has left no trace whatsoever above ground. No bank, no ditch, no suggestion in the grass that anything was ever there. It is, in a quiet way, a monument to its own disappearance.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when earthen in construction, were enclosed farmsteads typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They usually consisted of a circular bank and ditch surrounding a domestic area, and thousands once dotted the Irish countryside. The Cloghroak example was a modest one, roughly subcircular in plan and approximately twenty-five metres in diameter. It was already noted as being in a very ruinous condition when McCaffrey recorded it in 1952, classifying it as a possible earthen rath. By that point, the damage had been accumulating for some time. The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows both enclosures still legible in the landscape, but by the 1933 edition a field wall had been driven straight through the monument from northwest to southeast, the kind of practical agricultural intervention that has quietly erased countless sites across Ireland. Its companion enclosure, immediately adjoining to the west, has fared no better.