At Ratharoon in County Cork, an oval earthwork roughly 30 metres by 36 metres can still be traced across a gently south-east-facing pasture slope, but only just. A rise of around 0.4 metres is all that distinguishes it from the surrounding ground, the last physical trace of what was once a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular or oval enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, typically used as a farmstead during the early medieval period.

The reason so little survives is straightforward and dispiriting. The site was levelled around 1976, reducing a monument that had endured for perhaps a thousand years or more to little more than a faint topographical suggestion. Tens of thousands of ringforts once dotted the Irish landscape, and a significant proportion were destroyed during the twentieth century as agricultural mechanisation made it easier and more economical to clear earthworks from productive land. The Ratharoon example is a small but representative casualty of that broader pattern of loss.