At Sunfort in County Cork, a circular enclosure roughly twenty metres across once marked itself on the landscape clearly enough to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, drawn as a broken line suggesting a feature already partially gone. Today, the ground holds a rock outcrop tangled with bushes and briars, pasture running down to the east bank of a small stream, and nothing else that the eye can readily interpret as ancient.

Enclosures of this type, often associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically consisted of an earthen bank or a low stone wall defining a roughly circular domestic space. The broken-line convention used by nineteenth-century OS surveyors was a deliberate notation, indicating that the cartographers could see enough to plot something but not enough to be confident of its full extent or condition. By the time anyone was recording the site in systematic archaeological terms, even that partial outline had dissolved into the slope. The name Sunfort itself carries a certain irony, suggestive of something fortified and prominent, while the place now offers neither.