Somewhere on a south-west-facing slope in mid-Cork, a ringfort that had survived for well over a thousand years was levelled around 1967, absorbed back into the tillage field around it, leaving no visible surface trace. The place is recorded, catalogued, assigned a number; the thing itself is gone.

When the archaeologist P. J. Hartnett documented the site in 1939, he found a circular enclosure roughly 111 feet in diameter, defined by a single earthen bank standing about five feet high, with an entrance facing south. A souterrain ran beneath the interior. Souterrains are underground stone-lined passages or chambers, typically associated with early medieval ringforts in Ireland, and used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation. Ringforts, known as raths when they are earthwork enclosures rather than stone-built structures, were the standard farmstead type of early medieval Ireland, occupied broadly from the sixth to the twelfth centuries. This one sat on agricultural land, and agricultural land, in the end, is what reclaimed it. Local information puts the destruction at around 1967, a decade when the intensification of farming and the arrival of heavier machinery erased a significant number of earthworks across the country that had endured since the early Christian period.

The name Rathcoola itself preserves the memory, as Irish place names so often do, the word rath appearing in the townland name long after the physical rath has ceased to exist. It is a common enough irony in the Irish landscape, where the nomenclature outlasts the archaeology by centuries.