The ringfort at Derrynasling in County Tipperary was still visible, just, when an investigator from the Office of Public Works came to document it in 1955. By the time that record was filed, the site had been erased.

A ringfort, or rath, is one of the most common monument types in the Irish landscape, a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and an outer ditch, used primarily as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period. The example at Derrynasling sat on flat pasture with open views in every direction, the kind of position that made sense for a family keeping watch over livestock and land. Wheeler, surveying for the OPW in 1955, recorded a circular enclosure of approximately 33 metres in diameter, its bank still standing around two metres high, with an external fosse, the ditch running around the outside, measuring five metres wide and 0.7 metres deep. The bank was described even then as poorly preserved. That same year, a land reclamation scheme levelled what remained. The survey and the destruction appear to have happened in the same moment, or close enough to make little practical difference.

What is left now is the record itself, the measurements, the compass of the thing, the fact that someone thought to write it down before the machinery moved in. The flat pasture at Derrynasling holds no visible trace of what Wheeler saw. The site exists now only on paper, a set of dimensions describing a circle that is no longer there.