Others have vanished so completely into the farmland that only the instruments of aerial survey can confirm they were ever there. A circular enclosure near Kilconly Church in north Kerry belongs to this second, quieter category; levelled to the point of invisibility at ground level, it survives only as a faint signature in the soil, readable from the air but otherwise gone.

Circular enclosures of this type are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape. They typically represent the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built and used across Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onwards, consisting of a circular bank and ditch that once defined a domestic or agricultural space. The Kilconly example sat to the north-north-west of the old church, with a small stream running to its south. It appeared as a recognisable circular feature on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1840 to 1841, and again on the revised maps of 1914 to 1915, which suggests it still held some visible form well into the nineteenth century. By the time aerial photography became a routine tool of landscape archaeology, however, it had been levelled, and it was aerial photographs taken by the Geological Survey of Ireland in 1974 that confirmed its outline could still be detected from above, where patterns of soil moisture and crop growth can reveal the ghost of a filled-in ditch long after every surface trace has gone.