In a long, narrow pastoral field at Togherbane in north County Kerry, there was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which is a roughly circular earthen enclosure typically used as a farmstead during the early medieval period. Today, nothing of it can be seen above ground. The grass grows evenly, the field carries on, and only the cartographic record preserves any memory of the place at all.

The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey map of 1842, which means the enclosure was still visible, at least as earthworks, in the mid-nineteenth century. By the time the 1916 edition of the same map was produced, it had been omitted entirely, suggesting that within roughly three generations the physical remains had been levelled, ploughed out, or otherwise erased. This kind of disappearance was not unusual across Ireland, where agricultural improvement and land clearance from the eighteenth century onwards removed a significant proportion of the country's earthwork archaeology. What makes the Togherbane example quietly instructive is the precision with which the two maps bracket the loss, offering a narrow window into when, if not why, the rath ceased to exist as a visible feature in the landscape.