Or at least, there was one on the map. The 1923 Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet records it clearly enough: an embanked circular enclosure roughly 25 metres in diameter, the kind of earthwork that once served as a farmstead or defended homestead for an early medieval Irish family. When surveyor Denis Power went looking for it in 2011, he could not find it at all.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they are defined by earthen banks rather than stone, are among the most common archaeological monuments in the Irish landscape, with tens of thousands recorded across the country. They date broadly to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and would originally have enclosed a dwelling, perhaps outbuildings, and provided some degree of protection for livestock. The one at Kerrikyle was substantial enough to be mapped in the early twentieth century, sitting on that awkward north-easterly incline in what is now dense plantation forestry. It is precisely the combination of those two things, the gradient and the trees, that appears to have swallowed it. The undergrowth in commercial conifer plantations can be extraordinarily thick at ground level, and earthworks that are perfectly legible from the air or on an old map can become almost impossible to trace on foot.

For anyone curious enough to go looking, the difficulty is the point. The site sits within forestry, and the slope is described as steep, so the approach will not be straightforward. There is no guarantee the monument will be any more accessible now than it was when Power compiled his notes; if anything, the plantation may have matured further in the intervening years. What the site offers, practically speaking, is less a visible monument than an exercise in thinking about how archaeology disappears, not through destruction but through simple accumulation: of needles, of shadow, of time. The 1923 map remains the clearest evidence that something is there, somewhere beneath the trees.