At Danganbeg in County Limerick, a ringfort, or rath, was recorded as recently as 1924 on an Ordnance Survey six-inch map, showing a circular embanked enclosure of roughly twenty-five metres in diameter. Today, the site is occupied by farm buildings, and the earthwork itself is no longer apparent on the ground.

Ringforts are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, with estimates suggesting somewhere in the region of forty to fifty thousand once existed across the island. They are broadly dated to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and typically served as enclosed farmsteads, the surrounding bank and ditch offering a degree of security for a family and their livestock. The rath form, as distinct from the stone-built cashel, relied on an earthen bank, sometimes topped with a timber palisade, and an external fosse or ditch. The Danganbeg example, at twenty-five metres across, would have been a modest but not unusual specimen. Its presence was documented by the 1924 Ordnance Survey revision, which means it survived in some recognisable form into the early twentieth century before being lost, most likely to agricultural consolidation and the expansion of farm infrastructure during the intervening decades. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded to the survey database in August 2011.

There is little for a visitor to see at Danganbeg today, which is itself part of what makes this entry worth noting. The farm buildings that now cover the site leave no visible trace of the enclosure. What remains is the cartographic evidence, the faint outline on the 1924 six-inch sheet, which can be viewed through the historical map layers of the Ordnance Survey Ireland website. For anyone interested in how quickly these features can disappear from the physical record while persisting in archival form, that comparison between old map and current satellite imagery is a useful, if sobering, exercise.