In a pasture on a north-west-facing slope near Lisgoold in County Cork, there was once a ringfort, a type of circular enclosure, typically earthen-banked, that served as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period. Today there is nothing to see. The site has been levelled completely, leaving no visible surface trace in the grass.

What we know comes from cartography rather than fieldwork. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842 recorded the feature as a circular enclosure roughly twenty-five metres in diameter, a modest but not unusual size for a rath, as these earthworks are also known. At some point between that survey and the present, the structure was removed, most likely through agricultural improvement, the gradual process by which farmers cleared, drained, and levelled land that earthworks had long interrupted. It is a fate that has befallen a significant proportion of Ireland's ringforts, which once numbered in the tens of thousands across the island.