Go to that spot today and you will find nothing. No earthwork, no trace of a ring, no depression in the soil. The pastureland simply continues, unmarked, as though the cartographers were recording something that had already become a rumour.

Circular enclosures of this kind, often referred to as ringforts, were among the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of an earthen bank and fosse enclosing a domestic space. Thousands survive in varying states of preservation across the country. This one does not. It sat within a few hundred metres south of the Laune river, a significant watercourse flowing out of Lough Leane through the low ground of the Iveragh peninsula. Whether it was levelled deliberately, worn away gradually by agriculture, or simply misidentified by the original surveyors in the nineteenth century is not recorded. Its presence on the OS first edition at least confirms that something was visible, or believed to be visible, at the time of mapping. That evidence has since been erased, leaving only the map itself as a kind of fossil.