In lush pasture on a south-south-west-facing slope at Moskeagh in County Cork, what was once a rath, a circular earthen enclosure of the early medieval period typically used as a defended farmstead, has been levelled to the point where nothing remains visible at ground level. The only structural trace is a field boundary running roughly north to south, with a deep ditch along its eastern side, which appears to cut directly through the centre of what the enclosure once was.

What makes the site historically legible at all is a map. In 1775, a cartographer named B. Scalé marked this spot on map number 26 of what is now a private collection, labelling it a circular "Danes Fort", the term commonly applied in that period to ancient earthworks of all kinds, often attributed, incorrectly, to Viking activity. The label tells us less about who built the rath than about eighteenth-century assumptions regarding mysterious earthworks in the Irish countryside. By the time Scalé was drawing, the site was presumably already reduced enough to prompt curiosity rather than recognition. That a cartographer noted it at all suggests it was considered a landmark of some kind, even if its origins were misread.