These circular earthwork enclosures, known in Irish as raths, were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more raised earthen banks enclosing a roughly circular area used for settlement and livestock. Most survive as raised platforms in pasture, quietly outlasting the centuries. This one, in North Cork near Egmont House, was flattened around 1943, and yet the land has not entirely forgotten what was there.

The site appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured circular enclosure of roughly forty metres in diameter, shown at that time as planted with trees. Later editions, from 1905 and 1937, still recorded it as a hachured raised area, meaning the earthwork was visible and mappable well into the twentieth century. Its location, on a gentle south-east-facing slope about 450 metres to the north-east of Egmont House, placed it in agricultural land that was presumably brought into more intensive tillage use in the early 1940s. Local information dates the levelling to around 1943. Despite that, a low circular rise still survives, measuring just over thirty-four metres north to south and standing only about 0.4 metres above the surrounding ground. More revealingly, an aerial photograph taken in July 1989 shows the fosse, the outer defensive ditch that would originally have defined the enclosure's perimeter, still visible as a cropmark, the buried feature expressing itself through differential growth in the crop above. A second circular enclosure sits roughly 150 metres to the north-east, suggesting this part of North Cork was once a fairly settled early medieval landscape.