Somewhere on a north-north-east-facing slope in mid Cork, a ringfort once occupied the ground, and for well over a century its circular earthen bank was faithfully recorded on Ordnance Survey maps. Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are the remains of enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, defined by one or more banks and ditches thrown up around a homestead. This one measured roughly thirty metres across. Then, around 1982, it was levelled. The land is now in tillage, and no surface trace remains.

What gives the site a certain melancholy weight is how long it endured before it disappeared. The same hachured circle, the cartographic shorthand for an earthen enclosure, appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842, 1904, and 1937, meaning the fort survived at least the Famine years, two world wars, and the upheavals of Irish independence, only to be cleared from a Cork hillside in the early 1980s. Before any of that, it had a name: Lis Dubh, or the Blackfort, recorded by Caulfield in 1866. The first element, lis, is an Irish word for an enclosed dwelling or court, closely related in usage to rath, and the qualifying word dubh, meaning black or dark, suggests the place carried some particular local character or association, though what that was is no longer recorded.