At Ahane in County Cork, a ringfort once sat in open pasture, its circular earthen rampart still visible as a raised hump in the landscape when Ordnance Survey cartographers mapped the area in 1938. That map, rendered in the traditional hachured style used to show relief and earthworks, recorded a roughly circular form about 25 metres across. By the time anyone thought to preserve what lay beneath it, the site had already been consumed by quarrying.

The fort had attracted at least two researchers before it disappeared entirely. Bowman, writing in 1934, described it as a levelled single-ramparted fort of around 39 yards in diameter on land belonging to a J. O'Keeffe. A ringfort, or rath, was typically an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, its occupants protected by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Three years later, Broker recorded the same levelled fort, this time noting its location in a field known locally as the Quarry Field, a name that perhaps signals the site's eventual fate. Broker also noted the presence of a souterrain associated with the fort, a souterrain being an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, often used for storage or refuge, frequently found in connection with ringforts across Ireland. That underground feature was assigned its own separate record, suggesting it may have survived, or at least left traceable evidence, even after the earthwork above it was gone.

What makes Ahane quietly sobering is that the record of its loss is so matter-of-fact. Within a few years of being documented, the site was quarried away. The 1938 map becomes, in effect, the fort's last portrait.