This ringfort at Ballycullane in County Cork does the opposite. It has been completely levelled, leaving no visible surface trace whatsoever, and the only reason we know it existed at all is a line on a nineteenth-century map. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a circular enclosure roughly 55 metres in diameter on a north-west-facing slope, the kind of modest but precise detail that now functions as the sole obituary for a structure that once organised someone's daily life.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the typical farmstead of early medieval Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They generally consisted of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used to protect a family, their livestock, and their buildings. A diameter of 55 metres would have made this a reasonably substantial example. Beneath it, or within its interior, lay a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that served variously for storage, refuge, or both. That underground element may well survive even where the surface earthworks have gone, since levelling the visible banks does not necessarily disturb what lies beneath. A second ringfort sits approximately 240 metres to the north-east, accompanied by a possible souterrain of its own, suggesting that this part of Ballycullane was once a settled, populated landscape rather than an isolated farmstead standing alone.