Somewhere on a south-west-facing pasture slope in County Cork, a ringfort once stood, a circular earthwork enclosure of roughly twenty metres in diameter. Today it has been levelled completely, leaving no visible trace on the ground. The site exists now only as an absence, a place that was once deliberately built and is now just as deliberately gone.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the fifth to the twelfth century. They consisted of a raised circular bank of earth, sometimes accompanied by an outer ditch, enclosing a domestic space where a farming family would have lived and kept livestock. The Killeena example was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which means that at the time of that survey it was still legible enough to be drawn as a circular enclosure. At some point after that, it was levelled, most likely through agricultural improvement or ploughing, until no surface trace remained. What the 1842 map preserves, then, is essentially the last known image of it, a thin ink circle representing something that had already stood for perhaps a thousand years before the cartographers arrived.