Somewhere beneath the fairways of the Curragh Golf Course in County Kildare, a circular enclosure roughly 45 metres in diameter once existed, visible enough in the nineteenth century to be recorded by cartographers, and now entirely gone from the surface of the earth. Not a stone, not a bank, not a shadow in the turf remains to suggest it was ever there.

The enclosure appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1838, which means surveyors working in the 1830s could see enough of it to plot its outline with reasonable confidence. Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland and typically date from the early medieval period, though some are considerably older. They generally functioned as enclosed farmsteads or settlement sites, defined by an earthen bank and sometimes a ditch, and are known in the archaeological literature as raths or ringforts. Whether this particular example was ever excavated, or simply levelled at some point in the intervening decades, the notes do not say. What is certain is that by the time anyone thought to look again, the ground had been given over to golf, and nothing legible was left.