The one at Rahan in north Cork is a quieter kind of survival. Around 1964, according to local memory, the ringfort was levelled to bring it into line with the field boundaries around it, a common enough fate for these early medieval enclosures during the mid-twentieth century as farming practices modernised and old earthworks were seen as obstacles rather than monuments.

A ringfort, or rath, was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. They are among the most numerous archaeological monument types in Ireland, yet that abundance did not protect many of them from clearance when land improvement schemes gathered pace after the Second World War. What remains at Rahan is a partial arc of the original bank, running from north to south-east, with an internal height of no more than 0.4 metres and an external height reaching just one metre at its highest point. It sits on a south-east-facing slope in pasture, and without knowing what to look for it would read simply as a slight undulation in the grass, the kind of low ripple that most walkers pass without a second thought.