Some mark a place where something was not found, and the story of that absence can be quietly telling. A field near Curragh in County Cork made it onto the provisional Sites and Monuments Record in 1988 as a potential site, flagged on the basis of an aerial photograph that seemed to suggest something worth investigating. Ten years later it had been reclassified as a non-antiquity, which is the official way of saying: nothing here, move along.

The paper trail is brief but revealing. A 1944 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the location as a quarry, the kind of working that could easily produce earthwork shadows visible from the air and plausibly mistaken, in an aerial photograph, for the outline of a rath, an enclosure, or some other buried feature. When someone actually visited the field in 1989, they found it had been levelled. Whatever surface irregularities had once caught the eye of a photo interpreter were gone, and there was not enough remaining evidence to support any claim that an archaeological monument had ever stood there. The site moved from potential to non-existent in the official record, a journey that took a decade and ended in a flat field.