At Corbally in County Cork, a ringfort once occupied a south-east-facing slope, its circular earthen bank enclosing a space of roughly 35 metres across. Today, there is nothing to see. The site has been levelled completely, leaving no visible surface trace of what was once a fairly typical example of an early medieval enclosed settlement.

A rath, to use the Irish term, was a farmstead of the early medieval period, generally dating from somewhere between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The enclosing bank and ditch were not primarily military defences but a way of marking out a household's territory, keeping livestock secure, and projecting a degree of social status. Thousands of them survive across Ireland in various states of preservation. This one in Corbally does not. What we know of it comes from the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, which recorded the enclosure as a legible circular feature in the landscape. At some point between that survey and the present, agricultural work or land clearance removed whatever earthworks remained. The map, in other words, outlasted the monument itself.