In a gently rolling field near Tobernagauhoge in County Westmeath, a ringfort survives not as an earthwork but as a curve in a field boundary, a slight and easy-to-miss arc tracing the edge of something that was already gone before most people now alive were born. Ringforts, roughly circular enclosures defined by an earthen bank and ditch, were built predominantly during the early medieval period and served as enclosed farmsteads. This one, positioned on a gentle rise with open views across the surrounding pasture, would have commanded a reasonable prospect of the land in several directions.

The 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a circular earthwork, meaning it was still legible in the landscape at that point, or at least recent enough in memory and form to be worth mapping. By 1971, however, a field assessment found no surface remains whatsoever. The bank had been levelled entirely. What endured, possibly, was the line of a field boundary curving from south-southwest through west and on to north, an alignment that follows the outline of the original enclosure closely enough to suggest it was not coincidental. The boundary may have been laid along the remains of the old bank, or simply followed a depression or soil change that the bank left behind, the land retaining the memory of a structure the eye can no longer see.