At Doonavanig in County Cork, a ringfort once stood in open pasture, a circular enclosure roughly 43 metres across, and today there is nothing left to see. The field shows no earthwork, no hollow, no raised rim. The site has been levelled entirely.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They served as farmsteads, protecting people, livestock, and stores. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation, but many others have been quietly erased by centuries of agriculture. The Doonavanig example was still visible enough in 1934 to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of that year, shown with hachuring, the cartographic shorthand used to indicate an earthen enclosure. Even then, the southern side had already been cut into by a laneway. At some point between that survey and more recent examination, whatever remained of the bank was levelled completely, leaving the pasture unbroken and the site traceable only through the old map sheet.