At Gortavranner in County Cork, a ringfort, the kind of circular earthwork enclosure built in early medieval Ireland to protect a farmstead and its inhabitants, once occupied an east-facing slope. It measured roughly 23 metres across. Today, there is nothing left to see.

What preserves the memory of it is a single cartographic moment: the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which recorded the feature as a hachured circular area, the surveyors' way of indicating a raised or banked enclosure on the ground. At that point the structure was evidently still legible in the landscape, enough for trained eyes to trace its outline and commit it to paper. At some point after that, the bank was levelled, the ground absorbed back into rough pasture, and the site lost whatever physical presence it once held. The slope gives no indication now that anything was ever there.