A circular enclosure, the kind of earthwork ringfort that was a common form of farmstead across early medieval Ireland, appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1841 to 1842, carefully recorded by surveyors working their way across the country. By the time the next major mapping revision came around in 1939, it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely. No surface trace survives today.

The likely explanation for its disappearance sits in the landscape as a continuous, unmistakable line: the Limerick and Tralee railway. The railway would appear to cut directly through the site, and the engineering work required to lay such a route, levelling ground, shifting earth, cutting embankments, would have been more than enough to obliterate an earthwork that had already survived for perhaps a thousand years. The enclosure at Skehanierin therefore occupies a particular category of loss, not gradual erosion or agricultural clearance, but a dateable erasure, somewhere between the Victorian survey and the industrial transformation of the nineteenth-century Irish countryside.

What remains is essentially a cartographic ghost. The 1841 to 1842 Ordnance Survey maps, produced with remarkable precision during a period of intense state interest in Irish topography, are often the sole surviving record of monuments that were already under pressure from changing land use. Skehanierin is one of those cases where the map outlasted the thing it described.