A ringfort that once stood on a west-facing slope at Monanimy in County Cork has been completely levelled, leaving no visible trace on the ground. What survives is a record rather than a ruin, specifically the mark it left on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appears as a hachured circular enclosure roughly twenty metres in diameter. Hachured markings on these early OS maps were the cartographers' way of indicating an earthen bank or raised feature, so even at the moment of recording, surveyors were capturing something already under pressure from agricultural use.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earthen banks rather than stone, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from around the sixth to the twelfth century. They served as farmsteads, their banks and ditches providing a boundary for a family's dwelling and livestock rather than any serious military defence. The Monanimy example, modest at twenty metres across, was a fairly small specimen of the type. By the time it was mapped in 1842, it was possibly already diminished, and subsequent tillage on the slope eventually erased it entirely. What makes the situation at Monanimy particularly interesting is that a second ringfort survives in the same field, approximately fifty metres to the north-north-west. Paired or clustered ringforts within a single field are not unheard of in the Irish landscape, and their proximity raises quiet questions about the families or communities who once occupied them and their relationship to one another.