On a low rise in poorly drained pasture near Cloonmore, a ringfort once stood, and while the landscape still holds the memory of it, there is nothing left to look at. No earthworks, no raised profile, no trace that a casual eye could catch.

A rath, to use the Irish term, is a type of early medieval enclosure, typically circular, formed by one or more earthen banks and ditches and used as a farmstead or place of habitation. The Ordnance Survey mapped this one in 1837, marking it clearly as a circular enclosure and labelling it simply 'Fort'. Fifty years later, when the same maps were revised, the designation had quietly shifted to 'Site of', a cartographic admission that whatever had stood there was already gone, or going. That downgrade in language, from a named feature to a memorial of one, is a small but telling piece of history in itself. The damp, low-lying ground it occupied would not have made for easy farming in any era, which perhaps explains why a raised enclosure was built there at all; slight elevations in waterlogged terrain were worth claiming.