On the ground, it is considerably harder to find. This ringfort in Creeves, in the old barony of Connello Lower in County Limerick, belongs to a particular category of Irish monument, one that exists more confidently in the archive than in the landscape.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches thrown up around a central living area. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. The Creeves example was recorded on the 1841 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as an embanked circular enclosure; by the time the 1923 six-inch revision was made, the cartographers were depicting it as a penannular enclosure, meaning the circuit of the bank had an opening or gap rather than forming a complete ring. That change between surveys is itself worth noting: it may reflect genuine deterioration over those eight decades, or simply a more careful reading of what was already there. Either way, the monument was sufficiently visible in both periods to be mapped with some confidence. What the compiler Denis Power found when he surveyed the site was something different. The enclosure is not apparent on the ground. The gentle north-east-facing slope where it should lie is given over to rough pasture, with limestone breaking through the surface in scattered outcrops, the whole area colonised by thickets of scrub.

For anyone inclined to look, the site sits within an agriculturally marginal piece of ground, the kind of terrain where monument survival is common precisely because the land was never worth ploughing intensively. The limestone outcrops are the defining feature of the immediate landscape, and in spring or early summer, before the scrub fills in fully, there may be traces of the bank visible to a careful eye. Do not expect clear earthworks. Bring the old OS maps, compare them with what is underfoot, and treat the exercise as much about reading a landscape as about seeing a monument.