This one offers nothing of the sort. A ringfort once stood in a pasture field at Cooliney in north County Cork, a circular enclosure roughly twenty metres across, and today there is no visible trace of it whatsoever. It has been levelled completely, leaving the field looking like any other stretch of grazing land. What makes it worth knowing about is precisely this absence, and the fact that its existence is only confirmed at all because a cartographer recorded it in 1842.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They served as farmsteads, and many thousands survive across the country. The Cooliney example appeared on the six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1842, rendered as a hachured circular enclosure, the standard surveying convention for showing a raised or defined earthwork. At some point between that survey and the present day, the feature was removed, most likely through agricultural activity. What the 1842 map preserves, then, is a record of something that no longer exists on the ground. A second ringfort survives roughly forty metres to the east-southeast, in an adjoining field, which suggests this part of Cooliney once supported at least two such enclosures in close proximity, a pairing that was not unusual in early medieval Ireland, where ringforts sometimes clustered within sight of one another.