At Cloghaneleesh in north County Kerry, a ringfort once existed that is now known only because a cartographer recorded it in 1842. No earthwork survives, no crop mark announces itself from the air, and nothing underfoot gives any indication that a substantial circular enclosure ever stood here.

A rath, as ringforts built from earthen banks and ditches are commonly called, would typically have served as a farmstead in early medieval Ireland, with a raised perimeter offering both a degree of status and some protection for livestock and family. The Ordnance Survey map of 1842 recorded this one as a large circular enclosure, south of another known site in the same townland. By the time a later edition of the map was produced, it had already disappeared from the record, and nothing on the ground today corresponds to what the earlier surveyors saw. Whether the enclosure was levelled for agricultural improvement, eroded gradually, or was already diminished by the time the first surveyors arrived is not known. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, documented it among hundreds of sites across the region, preserving at least the fact of its former existence.

There is nothing to see at Cloghaneleesh, which is in its own way the point. The site is a reminder that the archaeological map of Ireland is partly a record of things that have already gone, and that a nineteenth-century cartographer sometimes preserved the only surviving evidence that something was ever there at all.