A ringfort that stood for well over a thousand years in the Coolmona area of County Cork was levelled around 1972 during routine field fence clearance, and today there is no visible surface trace. What had been a legible earthwork, captured on Ordnance Survey maps from 1842, 1904, and 1939 as a hachured circular enclosure of roughly 30 metres in diameter, is now ordinary pasture.

When the archaeologist Hartnett recorded the site in 1939, it was still intact enough to measure: an oval fort approximately 132 feet north to south and 126 feet east to west, enclosed by a bank that had already collapsed and spread to a height of around three feet, with a shallow fosse, the shallow ditch that typically accompanied such enclosures, running around its perimeter. Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the standard form of enclosed farmstead in early medieval Ireland, their earthen banks marking out a protected homestead rather than a military fortification. What makes the Coolmona site particularly striking even in its absence is its relationship to its neighbours. It was one of five ringforts spaced at remarkably even intervals over a distance of 800 metres along the south-facing slope of the Shournagh River valley. That deliberate, almost rhythmic spacing across a shared landscape suggests a settled community making coordinated use of the hillside, each farmstead within sight or shouting distance of the next. Four of those five survive in some form; this one does not.