At Coolbane in County Cork, a ringfort once occupied an east-facing slope in what is now open pasture. A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or place of settlement. The one at Coolbane measured around 25 metres in diameter. Today there is nothing to see, no bank, no ditch, no earthwork of any kind. The field gives no sign that anything was ever there.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a hachured enclosure, the cartographic shorthand used to indicate an earthwork or raised feature. Even then, part of it had already been cut away by a quarry to the north-north-east and south. Whatever remained of the earthwork after that quarrying survived into the late twentieth century, when, according to local information, it was levelled around 1969. That date, passed on by word of mouth rather than any formal record, is the last piece of information attached to the site. After that, the pasture closed over it.