At Clashelane in County Cork, a ringfort once occupied a gentle south-south-east-facing slope, its circular earthen bank enclosing a space of roughly 40 metres across. Today, standing in the same pasture, you would see nothing at all. The ground gives no hint that anything was ever there.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland and used as a farmstead or homestead for a family of some local standing. The Clashelane example is known primarily because it was captured on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where it appears as a hachured roughly circular enclosure, the hachuring being the cartographic convention surveyors used to suggest the sloping profile of an earthwork. That map, produced during the first comprehensive survey of Ireland, recorded hundreds of such features that have since disappeared. In this case, the ringfort was subsequently levelled, most likely through agricultural improvement, leaving the 1842 survey as the main evidence that it existed at all. The site sits on a slope with a sharp fall of ground to the south-west, a position that would have offered both drainage and a degree of natural advantage to whoever once lived within the bank.