Not physically, not entirely, but cartographically: the circular enclosure that surveyors had carefully recorded in the mid-nineteenth century was simply gone from the later sheet, replaced by nothing more than a slight irregularity in a field boundary line. That kink in the earthwork, easy to miss from a distance, is now the most visible evidence that something was once here.

A rath, as ringforts of this type are sometimes called, was a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland, broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth century. Thousands were built across the country, and thousands have since been damaged or destroyed by agriculture. The Gorteenavalla example sits at the northern end of a low ridge rising above an otherwise flat valley, a position typical of early medieval settlement, where a modest elevation offered drainage and visibility without sacrificing access to the surrounding land. By the time of the 1840 survey, the enclosure was already partially absorbed into the local field system, with boundaries running through its southern and western sectors. By 1904, it had been levelled entirely, its approximate diameter of thirty-three metres surviving only as a ghost in the landscape, traced by that remaining earth and stone field bank.

The site is under pasture, and the evidence on the ground is subtle: the faint curve of the old bank where it persists, and the anomalous angle at which one field boundary meets another, following the line of a structure that the fields themselves have long since swallowed.