On a gentle rise in the rolling pasture of Clonboy in County Westmeath, there once stood a bivallate ringfort, a type of early medieval enclosure defined by two concentric earthen banks and ditches, typically used as a defended farmstead. Today, there is nothing left to see.

The fort was still visible, at least on paper, in 1837, when it was marked as 'Fort' on the Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map of that year, depicted as a circular, tree-lined earthwork with its double-bank structure clearly legible. By 1971, whoever examined the site found no surface remains whatsoever. Centuries of agricultural activity had done their work. The landscape had simply absorbed it. The rise itself remains, along with those good open views to the west, north, and east that would have made the position a sensible one for a farming settlement perhaps a thousand or more years ago. But on modern aerial photography, even the cropmark evidence that sometimes betrays a buried earthwork is absent. The site exists now almost entirely as a cartographic memory.