At Gortshaneroe, on a north-facing slope in a mountainous stretch of County Tipperary, there was once a rath, the common Irish term for a ringfort, which are the circular enclosures, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, that served as farmsteads and defended homesteads throughout early medieval Ireland. This one measured roughly thirty metres in diameter. Today, a working quarry occupies the site, and the fort is not visible at ground level.

The rath was recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable series of nineteenth-century field notes compiled by antiquarians working alongside the OS mapping project. The relevant entry, cited by O'Flanagan in a 1930 edition of those letters, described a circular area enclosed by a low earthen bank, sitting on rising ground in what was even then a remote and upland landscape. Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien included it in their 2002 archaeological inventory of North Tipperary, by which point the quarry had already rendered the original earthwork undetectable. The site exists now mainly as a record, a place that can be named and located on a map but no longer read in the land itself.