At Rathmorrel in north County Kerry, a circular earthwork enclosure was mapped in detail by the Ordnance Survey in 1842, given a presence on paper, and then quietly vanished. By the time surveyors passed through again in 1916, it had gone from the map entirely, and today no surface trace remains to mark where it once stood.

The site was a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was a type of enclosed farmstead typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Constructed from earthen banks and ditches arranged in a circle, raths served as homesteads and farmyards for farming families across the Irish countryside; thousands of them survive in various states across the island, though many more have been lost to agriculture and development over the centuries. This particular example at Rathmorrel sat two fields east of a neighbouring recorded site, and its presence on the 1842 Ordnance Survey map suggests it was still a legible feature of the landscape at that point, even if already diminished. What happened in the intervening seventy-odd years is unrecorded, but the most likely cause is agricultural clearance, the gradual levelling of earthworks to make way for pasture or tillage, a process that accelerated significantly during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries across Kerry and the wider country.