It exists on paper, it almost certainly still exists in the ground, but no one has been able to get eyes on it for many years. That particular kind of disappearance, from the map and from view, gives this site an odd double absence.

A ringfort, or rath, is one of the most common early medieval monument types in Ireland, typically a circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, used as a farmstead or place of settlement roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The Fawnamore example was recorded as an embanked circular enclosure of approximately 40 metres in diameter on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1841, which means surveyors could see it clearly enough to measure and plot it at that time. By the 1923 revision of the same map series, it had vanished from the record entirely. Whether the cartographers judged it too degraded to include, or simply missed it, the notes compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011 indicate that the site could not be inspected at all, because the terrain where it lies is now completely covered by scrub vegetation. The gently undulating ground has done what undulating ground in wet Irish climates tends to do: it has grown over.

For anyone curious enough to go looking, Fawnamore is a rural townland in County Limerick, and the general area is the kind of landscape where scrubby overgrowth makes cross-country movement genuinely difficult. There is no path to this monument, no marker, and no vantage point from which the enclosure's form can be made out. The 1841 OS six-inch map, freely available through the Irish Historic Maps viewer online, shows the enclosure as it was recorded before vegetation reclaimed the area, and comparing that with the modern satellite view gives a reasonable sense of how thoroughly the land has closed over. Short of significant clearance work, the earthwork itself remains inaccessible, which makes this less a site to visit and more a site to know about, a reminder that the archaeological record is always negotiating with the landscape around it.