This one in Dooneen, County Limerick, offers something rather more sobering: nothing at all. Where a ringfort once stood, there is now only a field of poorly-drained pasture on a gentle east-facing slope, the ground giving no sign that anything of significance ever occupied the spot.

A ringfort, or rath, is a circular or roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland as a defended farmstead. They are among the most common archaeological monuments in the country, numbering in the thousands. The one at Dooneen was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, where it appeared as a sub-circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately twenty metres, modest even by the standards of the type. By the time Denis Power came to inspect the site, the monument had been levelled entirely and was not evident on the ground. His findings were compiled and uploaded in April 2013, leaving a record that amounts, essentially, to an absence.

For anyone curious enough to seek it out, the site sits on farmland and there is no visible feature to orient yourself by once you arrive. The 1840 Ordnance Survey map remains the clearest evidence that something was ever there. The soggy, poorly-drained character of the surrounding pasture suggests the land has never been particularly amenable to cultivation, which makes the decision to level the monument all the more striking as an act of agricultural tidying. What is instructive here is less the site itself and more what its disappearance illustrates: that even the most numerous class of monument in Ireland is not immune to gradual erasure. The paper record, in this case, outlasts the earthwork by a considerable margin.