What was once a circular enclosure, the kind of earthwork that typically enclosed an early medieval farmstead or settlement, has been levelled so thoroughly that nothing is visible at eye level. But look at it from the air, and the outline reappears, picked up on Air Corps aerial photographs taken in 1949 and still discernible from above as recently as 1991. The ground, in other words, holds a memory that the surface no longer shows.

The enclosure was recorded on Ordnance Survey maps in both 1842 and 1897, so it was still a legible feature of the landscape well into the nineteenth century. At some point after that it was levelled, but aerial photography has revealed a patch of discolouration at the centre of the site, a common indicator of buried features such as house-sites or souterrains. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlements in Ireland, where they may have served for storage, refuge, or both. The Kerry Field Club noted a tradition of souterrains in this immediate vicinity as far back as 1948, and the area around Rahoneen appears in C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey of 1995, which drew together much of what was then known about sites of this kind across the region.

What makes Rahoneen quietly compelling is how much of its significance exists in registers that require specialist tools to read: old maps, archive photographs, soil chemistry visible only from altitude. There is nothing to stand beside or photograph, but the layered process of detection, cross-referencing maps from 1842 with mid-twentieth-century aerial surveys and field club observations, is itself a kind of archaeology, piecing together a place that the landscape has done its best to forget.