And yet the very completeness of its disappearance is part of what makes it worth paying attention to.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches arranged in a roughly circular plan. The site at Egmont appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 as a hachured sub-square enclosure, sitting just to the east of a field boundary. By the time the same cartographers returned in 1905 and again in 1937, it was being recorded as a more conventional circular enclosure, roughly thirty metres in diameter. Whether this shift reflects actual change on the ground or simply a difference in surveying interpretation is difficult to say. What is clear is that sometime around 1980, according to local memory, the bank was levelled entirely. The material from it was not carted away but pushed onto a nearby field boundary to the south-west, which may still incorporate some of that displaced earth. The only remnant is a slight rise to the south, a gentle swell in the pasture that traces the ghost of the original structure.