That is not much to look at, but the contrast between what was once there and what remains now tells a quietly sobering story about how ancient monuments disappear, not always dramatically, but by incremental commercial necessity.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a subcircular enclosure measuring roughly 67 metres north to south and 61 metres east to west, a sizeable example of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was typically a circular earthen enclosure used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. By the time the third edition of the same map was produced in 1930, the picture had already changed significantly, with only a fragment of the structure legible on the ground. The culprit was a sand and gravel quarry that had encroached directly upon the monument, removing the bulk of the earthworks and leaving the landscape permanently altered. The undulating grassland setting that the site occupies gives little indication today of the scale of what once stood here.