The ringfort at Templemary in north County Cork is exactly that kind of site: once an earthwork enclosure of some presence, it now survives only as a faint undulation in pasture ground, with a slight rise to the east as the last trace of what would have been a raised earthen bank.

A rath, as ringforts of this type are often called, was typically a circular or oval area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, serving as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period in Ireland. The Templemary example sat on a gently south-east-facing slope with a clear view down a stream valley toward the Boggeragh Mountains, the kind of position that suggests its builders were as interested in outlook and drainage as in any symbolic claim on the landscape. When the first Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1842, the enclosure appeared as a hachured oval, approximately 35 metres by 25 metres across. By the time the same area was resurveyed for the 1905 and 1936 editions, the cartographers recorded it as a roughly circular raised area of about 25 metres in diameter, already reduced in legibility. At some point between those surveys and the present, the earthworks were levelled altogether, most likely through agricultural improvement of the surrounding pasture.