Not obscured by vegetation or tucked behind a wall, but genuinely gone from the surface of the land, absorbed into the surrounding fields through successive rounds of agricultural improvement. What survives is essentially a cartographic ghost.

A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically circular, formed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as a farmstead or defended homestead. The one at Tullig measured roughly 25 metres in diameter, and it appears clearly on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1846, drawn as a circular enclosure on the sloping pasture above the stream. By the time the revised six-inch map was produced in 1895, something had already changed: the northern and eastern arcs of the enclosure had been straightened and folded into the surrounding field boundary system, their curves quietly ironed out into utilitarian right angles. The remaining traces were later lost entirely when the landowner levelled the field boundaries and reseeded the land during reclamation works. The process was gradual and mundane, the kind of incremental erasure that happens on working farmland across Ireland, one improvement at a time.

There is nothing to see at Tullig now, which is precisely what makes it worth knowing about. The site is a reminder that the distribution of surviving ringforts across Ireland, of which there are tens of thousands still standing, represents only a fraction of what once existed. Many others are known only from early maps, crop marks visible in aerial photographs, or the memory of landowners. This particular one left a clear trace on the 1846 survey, a small circle on a hillside, and then, over the following century and a half, disappeared entirely into the fields around it.