The field at Marshalstown in north Cork is known locally as the lios field, using the Irish word for a ringfort, and that small piece of living nomenclature is now the only reliable marker that anything was ever there. The earthwork itself is gone, levelled at some point into the surrounding pasture, leaving no visible trace on the surface.

Ringforts, or raths, are roughly circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built primarily during the early medieval period in Ireland and used as enclosed farmsteads. They are one of the most common monument types in the Irish landscape, numbering in the tens of thousands, yet a great many have been quietly lost to agriculture, drainage, and development over the centuries. The Marshalstown example was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, shown as a hachured circular enclosure of approximately thirty metres in diameter. That survey, the first large-scale systematic mapping of the Irish countryside, caught thousands of such features at a moment when many were already under pressure. By the time anyone thought to look more carefully at this particular one, it had already disappeared into the grass.