What was once a circular earthwork roughly 42 metres across, of the kind known in Irish as a rath, an enclosed farmstead typical of the early medieval period, has been ploughed flat, leaving only a scatter of stone across a north-facing slope in Springfield, County Cork. The rath itself is gone, but the landscape has not quite forgotten it.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site clearly as a circular enclosure, which gives at least a fixed point in the story of its disappearance. By the time later editions of the same map were produced, the feature had been reduced to little more than a northward kink in a field fence running roughly north-northwest to south-southeast, the kind of anomaly that a farmer might notice without ever knowing its cause. Ringforts are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, numbering in the tens of thousands, yet a substantial proportion have been lost to agricultural improvement over the past two centuries. The Springfield example appears to have followed precisely that trajectory, brought under tillage and levelled until no earthwork remained above ground.