At Rathmore in County Tipperary, there is a place that appears on nineteenth-century maps as a clearly defined circular enclosure, the kind of feature that in the Irish landscape usually marks an early medieval settlement, a ringfort or enclosed farmstead where families once lived, kept livestock, and organised their world within a boundary bank and ditch. By the time anyone went to look for it on the ground, it had gone.

The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1843, shows the site as a circular enclosure, a form so common across Ireland that tens of thousands of examples survive, or once did. The second edition of 1903 still marks it, now with hachuring, the cartographic shorthand that indicates slight earthworks or rising ground. But a field inspection carried out in 1995 found no surface remains whatsoever. The enclosure had been classified as such in official records as recently as 1992, and by 1998 it was being described alternatively as a tree ring site, a term used when a circular arrangement of trees or a patch of disturbed vegetation suggests that something lies just beneath the surface, or once did. The gap between what the maps recorded and what the ground now holds is more than a century of agricultural change, drainage, and levelling.