The ringfort at Loumanagh in north Cork is exactly that kind of site. Once a clearly defined oval enclosure on a south-facing slope, it has since been levelled to the point where only a soilmark in a reseeded field traces the ghost of its original shape, roughly 35 metres east to west and 29 metres north to south.

A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. They were the ordinary domestic settlements of rural Ireland for several centuries, and thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. The example at Loumanagh appears in the 1842, 1904, and 1937 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, each time rendered as a hachured circular enclosure, the conventional cartographic shorthand for a raised earthwork. A 1934 account by a researcher named Bowman described what was almost certainly the same site on land belonging to a J. O'Connell, recording an oval ringfort measuring 41 yards by 34 yards, with its fosse, the surrounding ditch, already infilled but with the bank still standing roughly eight feet high on the outside and five feet on the inside. That is a substantial earthwork by any measure. An aerial photograph taken on 28 June 1984 shows the site still upstanding at that point, with trees planted along the bank, which may itself have hastened the eventual levelling. Sometime between that photograph and subsequent visits, the structure was lost to agricultural improvement, leaving only the slightly raised interior and the faint compression of the soil to mark where it stood.