At Ballymacquin in north County Kerry, a site once known as Rathbeg, or Ráth Bheag in Irish, meaning simply "small ringfort", has been so thoroughly levelled that no surface trace remains. There is nothing to see at all, which is itself a kind of fact worth sitting with.

A ringfort is a roughly circular enclosure, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as a farmstead or settlement during the early medieval period in Ireland. Rathbeg appears on the Ordnance Survey maps of both 1842 and 1916 as a large circular enclosure, which creates a small paradox in itself: a site with a name meaning "small" was mapped as a notably large example of its type. The 1842 map records something more intriguing still. Within the interior of the enclosure, the word "cave" is marked, indicating what was likely a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage commonly associated with ringforts and used for storage or refuge. By the time the 1916 edition was produced, that notation had vanished from the map, and at some point between then and now the earthworks themselves were removed entirely, probably through agricultural clearance.