Somewhere beneath the pasture on a north-facing slope in County Cork, a ringfort once stood. It measured roughly thirty metres in diameter, and it was recorded as a clear circular enclosure on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842. At some point after that, it was levelled, leaving no visible surface trace whatsoever. The land absorbed it entirely.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common settlement type in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They served as farmsteads for individual families, and tens of thousands were built across the country between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. The one at Lackenroe is now known only from that mid-nineteenth century cartographic record, a ghost of a circle on an old map. What makes its situation quietly strange is that it does not stand alone in its disappearance. A second levelled ringfort lies approximately three hundred and fifty metres to the west. Two enclosures, the same fate, the same absence. Whether both were cleared in the same period of agricultural improvement, or decades apart, is not recorded.