At Ballynamona in County Limerick, a ringfort once occupied a south-west-facing slope of outcropping limestone, and the Ordnance Survey recorded it carefully in 1841, noting a circular embanked enclosure of roughly twenty metres in diameter. A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is an early medieval farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one does not survive at all.

When Denis Power inspected the site, he found no trace of the monument remaining. The pasture had absorbed it entirely. What the 1841 six-inch map shows is a clean, confident circle, the kind of mark that surveyors drew when the feature was still legible on the ground. Between that survey and the inspection logged in August 2011, the enclosure was levelled, most likely through agricultural activity over generations. The limestone bedrock that outcrops across this part of Limerick makes the land attractive for grazing and, in places, difficult for earthworks to survive undisturbed. The rath at Ballynamona left no mound, no ditch, no scatter of stones to mark where it once stood.

There is still something to be said for visiting a place like this, though the experience is an unusual one. The landscape itself, a gently sloping hillside with the particular pale quality that limestone country gives to the ground, is the only context remaining. The 1841 OS map is the most useful companion; comparing the confident circular mark on the historical survey with the unmarked pasture in front of you gives a sharper sense of how quickly an earthwork can disappear once the decision, or the neglect, to remove it takes hold. The site sits in ordinary farmland, and any visit would require the usual considerations around access and landowner permission.