A few courses of stone, a raised lip of earth, something that breaks the skyline and tells you something once stood here. The ringfort at Tobermurry in County Limerick does not even have that. Where there was once a rath, a type of circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period, there is now a silage pit and the shadow of a large farm shed to the east.

The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1841 as an embanked circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately 25 metres, set into rough pasture within a natural depression, with higher ground rising to both the east and west. That topographical detail is worth pausing on. Ringforts were often deliberately positioned in such hollows or on low sheltered ground, perhaps for practical reasons of drainage and wind, perhaps for others we can only speculate about. By the time Denis Power compiled the record for upload in August 2011, the earthworks had been levelled entirely and the site absorbed into working farmland.

For anyone interested in the archaeology of the Irish landscape, Tobermurry is not a place to visit so much as a place to think about. There is nothing visible on the ground. The coordinates may bring you to a field in County Limerick that looks entirely unremarkable, and in its current state it is. The value is in what the record represents, which is the quiet, undramatic disappearance of thousands of such monuments across Ireland, erased not through dramatic upheaval but through the slow accumulation of agricultural need. If you are travelling the area and looking for a comparable site in better condition, the surrounding landscape of County Limerick holds other ringforts that have survived with their earthworks more or less intact, and those offer a clearer sense of what once occupied this particular hollow in the pasture at Tobermurry.