This one in Lisgordan, County Limerick, offers something rather different: an absence. What was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a roughly circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches that served as a farmstead during the early medieval period, is now simply a patch of ground on an east-facing slope, with no visible trace remaining of the monument at all.

The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1841 as an embanked circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately thirty metres. That map, produced during the first systematic survey of Ireland, captured thousands of such earthworks across the country, many of which were still largely intact at the time. At Lisgordan, however, the monument has since been levelled entirely. The land now falls within the grounds of Newcastle West golf course, and when Denis Power inspected the site and compiled his record in August 2011, he found no trace of the original structure. A shelter belt of deciduous trees stands on or very close to where the enclosure once lay, which is likely the only visible marker of its former location.

For anyone curious enough to seek it out, the site sits within the golf course grounds, which means access would require some awareness of where play is taking place at any given time. There is no earthwork to examine and no feature to photograph in the conventional sense. What makes it worth knowing about is precisely that quality of erasure: the 1841 map confirms something was here, carefully recorded by surveyors who noted its shape and scale, and yet the ground itself now gives nothing away. The trees, if they are indeed growing over the original footprint, mark the spot in the loosest possible sense.