Near Lisgoold in east Cork, a rath once occupied an east-facing slope, its circular earthen bank enclosing an area roughly thirty metres across. It is now gone entirely, levelled by agricultural work at some point before living memory, leaving no visible trace on the surface of what is today a tillage field.

A rath, or ringfort, is an enclosed settlement type common across early medieval Ireland, typically formed by one or more circular banks and ditches of earth, sometimes topped with a timber palisade, surrounding a domestic space where a farming family would have lived. Tens of thousands were built across the country between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. This particular example in Lisgoold was still present, or at least still legible as a crop mark or earthwork, when the Ordnance Survey conducted its first large-scale mapping of Ireland in 1842, and the surveyors recorded it clearly as a circular enclosure on the six-inch sheet for the area. At some point after that, the bank was broken up and the ground brought fully into cultivation. The 1842 map is now the most reliable evidence that it existed at all.