At Pluckanes in County Cork, a ringfort exists today primarily as a mark on an 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appears as a hachured circular enclosure roughly 35 metres in diameter. On the ground, the area is overgrown and leaves no apparent visible surface trace.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They usually consisted of a circular bank and ditch defining a domestic space, and they are among the most common monument types in the Irish landscape, with tens of thousands once present across the island. The Pluckanes example was recorded by the mid-nineteenth century surveyors who mapped Ireland with considerable care, their hachure marks indicating the slight raised earthwork that was then still legible in the terrain. What the map preserves, the intervening century and a half of growth and agricultural activity has largely erased at ground level.