Just barely, but there. This ringfort on a terrace above the south-eastern shore of Lough Carra in County Mayo was mapped in 1838 but had disappeared from the Ordnance Survey edition of 1917, and a survey from 1994 concluded it was levelled, with nothing left to see. When the ground was re-examined in 2017, the enclosure proved more stubborn than that. Its outline can still be read at ground level, if you know what to look for.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically built during the early medieval period as a farmstead or settlement. The Cloonkerry example is modest in scale, measuring about 51 metres north-east to south-west and 47 metres north-west to south-east. What survives is slight: an inner bank that barely rises above the surrounding pasture, a fosse (the ditch between the banks) now reduced to a shallow depression, and an outer bank that reaches no more than half a metre at its highest point on the north and north-west sides. A drystone field wall has been built directly over the outer bank and fosse along the south-east to south arc, which probably accounts for some of the erosion, and the original entrance, if there was one, is thought to have faced roughly east to south, where the enclosing elements have been lost entirely. A standing stone sits on higher ground about 230 metres to the south-west, suggesting the area held significance across more than one period.

The setting rewards attention even when the earthworks themselves are elusive. The terrace drops gently northward to the lake shore, and from the northern edge of the enclosure there are long views across Lough Carra, with Croagh Patrick visible on the horizon to the north-north-west and the Nephin Mountains to the north. Whoever chose this spot, well over a thousand years ago, was not indifferent to the view.