Some places earn their interest precisely by no longer existing. At Moortowncastle in County Kildare, a rath once occupied a moderately steep, south-west-facing pasture slope, its circular earthen bank enclosing an area roughly thirty-five metres across. A rath, or ringfort, is an early medieval enclosure, typically defined by one or more banks and ditches, that served as a farmstead and small defended homestead. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one does not survive at all.

The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, surveyed in 1838, recorded the site clearly: a circular enclosure with a bank that was partially tree-covered, suggesting it had already stood long enough to accumulate its own small ecology. At that point it was still legible in the landscape, a coherent feature with a defined shape and boundary. Sometime between 1953 and 1955, it was destroyed. The window is narrow, the cause unrecorded, but the timing places it squarely in a period of considerable agricultural intensification across Ireland, when older earthworks were frequently cleared to improve pasture or ease ploughing. Whatever the specific circumstances at Moortowncastle, the result was total: no visible surface trace survives today.