At Ballincrossig in north County Kerry, one such site has been losing ground, literally, since at least the mid-nineteenth century, and what survives today is barely a suggestion of what was once a complete circular enclosure.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. This example at Ballincrossig was recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842 as a complete circular enclosure, already slightly compromised by a fieldbank cutting across its northern to south-eastern arc. By the time the 1916 map was drawn, only a faint semi-circular shape remained marked, the rest presumably lost to agricultural activity in the intervening decades. The site sits roughly thirty metres south-east of a second enclosure in the same field, suggesting this was once a landscape with more than one focus of early settlement in close proximity. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, documented the site and noted that despite being much levelled, the earthwork remained distinguishable on the ground.

What a visitor would encounter today is modest: a barely perceptible curve in the land, meaningful mainly to someone who arrives already knowing what to look for. The value here is less in the spectacle than in the long, slow story of erasure, a common early medieval farmstead gradually absorbed back into the working countryside around it.