At Rathscannel in County Kerry, an enclosure sits, or once sat, in the north-west corner of a pastoral field, two fields south-west of a neighbouring recorded monument. No earthwork rises from the grass, no ditch catches the afternoon light at a low angle. The site survives only as a designation, a place where something was, and where nothing visible now remains.

What makes this absence legible at all is the Ordnance Survey. The enclosure appears on OS maps from both the 1841 to 1842 survey and again in the 1898 revision, which means that within living memory of the later mapping, there was presumably still enough surface evidence for cartographers to record it. Enclosures of this kind in Kerry are typically associated with early medieval settlement, and often take the form of a roughly circular earthen bank and fosse defining a domestic or agricultural space. At some point between the late nineteenth century and the present, whatever remained was lost, most likely to agricultural improvement, repeated ploughing, or simply the slow compression of generations of grazing. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, placed it on record as no. 783, preserving at least its location and its former presence on the landscape.