The rath at Knocks in County Cork does none of that. Lying in pasture on a south-facing slope, it survives today as little more than a slight scarp on its downslope side, a gentle shift in gradient that only makes sense once you know what you are looking at. Everything else has been absorbed, worn down, or swallowed by the land.

A rath is a ringfort of earthen construction, typically enclosing a farmstead of the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Thousands of them survive across Ireland in various states of preservation, but many, like this one, exist now mainly as cartographic memory. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 recorded it as a circular enclosure, which means that at the time of the first systematic mapping of the Irish landscape, there was still enough visible to draw. In the roughly 180 years since that survey, even those traces have largely gone, leaving only the scarp and whatever lies beneath the surface of the field.