What survives at Daars in County Kildare is, in the most literal sense, almost nothing, and yet that near-nothing is surprisingly legible. A circular patch of low-lying improved pasture, roughly 42 metres across, retains a scarp barely 30 centimetres high at its edge, and around that edge grows a ragged belt of nettles and thistles. That vegetation is not incidental. It marks the line of a filled-in fosse, the external ditch that once defined this as a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common throughout early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular bank with a ditch running around its outer edge.

By 1955, the site was already described as reduced to a low bank and external fosse. Sometime around 1970, even that was levelled, presumably as part of the gradual improvement of surrounding farmland for pasture. What the ground retained after levelling was little more than a faint circular scar and the differential soil conditions left by the old ditch, conditions that nettles and thistles, both lovers of disturbed, nutrient-rich ground, are well suited to exploit. An aerial photograph taken in 2005 still picked out the circular form from above, which is often how such subtly degraded sites reveal themselves, the geometry of the original enclosure preserved in crop or vegetation patterns long after the earthworks themselves have been smoothed away.