It had been there plainly enough in the earlier survey, a recognisable rath sitting at the base of a south-westward-facing slope on a high ridge, but by the time cartographers returned with updated measurements, it was gone. Not relocated, not renamed; just absent. That gap between two maps is, in its quiet way, a record of erasure.

A rath is a ringfort, the most common field monument in Ireland, typically a circular or oval area enclosed by an earthen bank and a fosse, the fosse being a ditch dug to provide material for the bank. They were farmsteads of the early medieval period, home to families and livestock rather than the defensive strongholds they are sometimes imagined to be. When surveyors visited Drinmore in 1970, enough remained to measure: roughly 52 metres north-west to south-east, 50 metres north-east to south-west, enclosed by a scarp still standing approximately 1.2 metres high in places, with a shallow fosse running from south around to west-north-west. A slight depression at the south-west was noted as a possible original entrance, around 12 metres wide at the top and 7 metres at the base. By that point, though, the monument was already compromised; a field boundary cut across the north-west perimeter, and a modern depression crossed the interior in the same quadrant.

What remains today is not visible on the ground in any meaningful sense. The site now registers only through aerial photography, where differential crop growth traces a circular mark in the soil, the buried fosse still influencing what grows above it even after the earthworks themselves have been levelled. It is the kind of presence that requires distance and the right season to perceive at all, a ghost of a farmstead that outlasted its own physical form by appearing, fleetingly, in the pattern of a field.