And yet that modest bump in a field is itself a kind of record, the last legible trace of a structure that was deliberately levelled around 1910. A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed circular or oval settlement typically dating from the early medieval period, built with an earthen bank and sometimes a ditch, used as a farmstead and homestead by families of middling status. Here, almost nothing of that form survives above ground, except for a stone-faced field fence that curves lightly to the west of the raised area, its arc hinting at the outline of something that once stood complete.

The fort's disappearance was not a gradual process. According to local information recorded by a writer named Broker in 1937, the land at Gortavehy belonged to a James Sullivan, and on it stood two separate forts, both deliberately cleared. The first, a small structure about thirty feet in diameter with a single enclosing fence, stood in a field known as Pairc na Sceiche and was levelled in 1905. The second, considerably larger at around half an acre, occupied a field locally called "the Square" and was cleared as far back as 1875, leaving, in Broker's own words, no trace at all. The site described here corresponds to the first of those two, the one levelled around 1910, and what survives is only that faint rise in the ground and the curving fence beside it. A third associated site lies in the adjoining field to the north-east. Together, this cluster points to a landscape that was once more densely marked by early settlement than its present pastoral appearance suggests, and to a period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when such monuments were routinely removed to ease agricultural work.