The one at Shandangan in County Cork did not get that chance. In October 1993 it was destroyed, and only in the act of destruction did it reveal what had been hidden beneath it all along.

The fort had occupied an east-west ridge, a circular enclosure roughly 34.5 metres across, defined by an earthen bank still standing 2.2 metres high. A rath of this kind, the most common form of early medieval farmstead in Ireland, typically enclosed a homestead and its outbuildings within a raised earthen rampart. At Shandangan, an earlier survey by Hartnett in 1939 had noted an external fosse, a defensive ditch, running along the southern and western sides, which would have made the site more substantial than it might first appear. None of that mattered when the machinery moved in. What the demolition did produce, unexpectedly, was the uncovering of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind frequently associated with ringforts and thought to have served for storage or as a refuge. The souterrain had lain beneath the fort, unrecorded, until the structure above it ceased to exist.