Near Castletownroche in north Cork, a low ripple in the pasture grass is almost all that survives of what was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built and occupied predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. These circular earthwork enclosures, defined by one or more banks and ditches, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, and thousands of them survive across the country in varying states of preservation. This one, at roughly thirty-five metres in diameter, would have been a modest but respectable example.

The site is known largely because it was captured on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1935, where it appears as a hachured circular enclosure, the cartographic convention used to indicate an earthwork of this kind. By the time that map was made, the rath may already have been under pressure from agricultural use, and at some point since it was levelled entirely. What remains are undulations in the ground, the faint memory of a bank that once defined someone's home and landholding, probably over a thousand years ago. The survival of the site on the map means its location and approximate dimensions are recorded even though the physical structure itself is gone.