Across rural Ireland, the modern road network has sliced through, buried, or quietly erased hundreds of early medieval enclosures, and the rath at Currahaly in Co. Cork is a case in point. What survives is roughly half of what was once a circular earthen enclosure about 40 metres across, the northern arc still readable as a low bank rising around 0.4 metres above the surrounding pasture. To the south, where the roadway runs east to west, the bank has been levelled entirely.

A rath, or ringfort, is a type of enclosed farmstead built and occupied largely during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the 5th and 12th centuries. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. The Currahaly example was already recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, which means its outline was still legible to the surveyors working that year, even if subsequent road-building had already done its damage. By 1939, the archaeologist Hartnett noted only a "track of rampart" on the southern side, suggesting the levelling was well advanced by then. What the northern arc preserves today is the merest suggestion of the original enclosure, a curved ridge in a field, easy to miss unless you know what you are looking at.