At Gowlane in County Cork, a ringfort once stood on a south-east-facing slope in what is now ordinary pasture. It measured roughly thirty metres in diameter, and by 1842 it was significant enough for the Ordnance Survey mappers to record it as a hachured circular enclosure, the standard convention for an earthwork of that kind. Today, there is no visible surface trace at all. The enclosure has been levelled, absorbed back into the field.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Thousands survive across the country, but a great many have been lost to agriculture over the centuries, and this example at Gowlane appears to be among them. What complicates the silence of this site is a discovery made in April 2000, when a souterrain was found within the bounds of the ringfort. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, often associated with early medieval settlements and thought to have served for storage or as a place of refuge. Its presence here confirms that something genuinely substantial once occupied this slope, even if the surface has long since been smoothed away. A companion ringfort lies just to the east, recorded separately, suggesting this was once a more densely settled corner of mid Cork than the current landscape would lead anyone to suspect.