At Rathmorrel in County Kerry, a large circular enclosure, almost certainly a rath or ringfort, was mapped in detail by the Ordnance Survey in 1842, only to have disappeared entirely from the equivalent survey carried out in 1916. A rath is an early medieval farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically built between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, and thousands of them survive across Ireland in various states of preservation. This one does not. No trace remains on the ground today.

The gap between those two survey dates, roughly seventy years, is a period that saw enormous disruption to the Irish landscape: the clearances and population collapse that followed the Great Famine of the 1840s, subsequent land reorganisation, and the gradual intensification of agricultural use across much of Munster. Any or all of these pressures could account for the levelling of an earthwork that had stood for perhaps a thousand years before a cartographer first recorded it. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, noted the enclosure's existence from the earlier map while confirming that nothing physical remained to investigate.