The one at Gortnacrusha in County Cork did not get that chance. Local tradition holds that a ringfort once occupied a south-facing slope here, and the curve of a field fence preserved in the 1902 Ordnance Survey six-inch map traces what appears to be the old arc of its boundary, running west to north-north-east across the landscape. But around 1979 the structure was levelled, most likely during agricultural improvement work of the kind that removed a significant number of earthworks across Ireland during the mid to late twentieth century.

What survives today is a slightly raised circular area, roughly 42 metres across on its north-south axis, visible as a low swell in the pasture. It is the kind of feature that reads clearly on the ground once you know what you are looking for, though it would be easy to dismiss as natural variation in the slope. The site carries an additional layer of complexity: it was inadvertently included in the first volume of the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, which covered West Cork, before being correctly assigned to the East and South Cork volume. More intriguingly, aerial photography has identified a separate circular enclosure immediately to the south-west, suggesting that the area around Gortnacrusha may have once held more than a single such site. Whether those two enclosures were related, contemporary, or simply neighbours across centuries is a question the current evidence does not answer.