Somewhere beneath the level pasture roughly ninety metres south of the Sullane River in mid-Cork, the earthwork remains of a rath, or ringfort, lie completely erased from the surface. A rath is a circular enclosure of raised earthen banks, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a defended farmstead, and thousands of them once punctuated the Irish countryside. This one has been levelled so thoroughly that no visible trace survives above ground.

The only firm record of its former presence is cartographic. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842 shows a hachured circular enclosure at this location, with a diameter of approximately twenty-five metres. Hachuring was the conventional method surveyors used at that period to indicate raised or depressed earthworks, so the map captures, however schematically, a monument that was still legible in the landscape at the time of the first systematic national survey. Sometime between that survey and the present, the enclosure was removed, most likely through agricultural improvement of the kind that quietly destroyed a significant proportion of Ireland's ringfort heritage across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The place-name Cathair Chearnaigh, which incorporates the Irish word cathair, sometimes used for a stone fort or enclosed settlement, suggests the site may have carried local significance long before the surveyors arrived.