At Skahanagh in County Cork, a ringfort that was carefully mapped by the Ordnance Survey in 1842 as a circular enclosure of roughly twenty metres in diameter has since been levelled entirely, leaving no visible surface trace in what is now tillage land. By the time the second and third editions of the OS maps were produced, the western side was already gone, reduced to a semi-circular ghost of the original. Today, even that ghost has been erased.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed settlement of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more circular earthen banks and ditches. They were domestic in origin, farmsteads of the kind that once scattered the Irish countryside in their thousands. What makes the Skahanagh example worth pausing over is its place within a wider local pattern recorded by the scholar Power in 1923. Citing the Ordnance Memoirs, Power noted that the surveyors had identified four lioses in the area, the Irish term for ringforts of this type. Three were still standing at the time of his writing, two with ramparts reaching five feet in height and a third, described as being of large size, with a rampart of nine feet. A further two, never recorded by the original surveyors, had already vanished without trace. The site at Skahanagh belongs to that second category of loss, places that slipped out of the landscape before anyone thought to measure them properly.