On a south-facing slope at Cornaveigh in County Cork, a ringfort once stood that is now entirely gone, levelled to the point where the ground gives no hint that anything was ever there. What we know of its shape and dimensions comes from a single historical source: the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which records a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter.

Ringforts, also known as raths, are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland. They are typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, consisting of a roughly circular area bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were domestic spaces, home to farmers and their livestock, and their circular form was a practical as much as a symbolic boundary. The Cornaveigh example, had it survived, would have been a fairly modest specimen at around thirty metres across. It sits within a wider landscape that retains at least one other ringfort, a second example lying roughly 190 metres to the southwest, which does appear to have survived in some form. The two sites together suggest this hillside was settled and farmed in the early medieval period, with households perhaps within sight of one another across the slope.

The 1842 map is the last reliable witness to this particular enclosure's existence. At some point between that survey and the present day, it was levelled, most likely through agricultural clearance. Nothing visible remains at the surface.