Something once existed at Fontstown in County Kildare that has since been almost entirely erased, yet two eighteenth-century maps preserve a ghost of it. The place was called Danesfort, a name of the kind commonly attached in Irish tradition to ringforts, the circular earthen enclosures built in early medieval Ireland as farmsteads and defended homesteads. What makes this particular site quietly puzzling is not what it was, but how it changed shape on paper within the space of nine years.

In 1764, a surveyor named B. Scale drew a 'Map of Upper Fonts Town' and recorded only the eastern half of what appears to have been a circular enclosure, labelling it Danesfort. By 1773, Scale had mapped the same area again, and this time the feature appears as a double-banked rectangular enclosure, with its western boundary defined by a field boundary that was clearly a later addition. The shift from circular to rectangular is telling. Ringforts, which typically present as a raised circular platform surrounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, were frequently pressed into agricultural use in later centuries, their banks levelled or squared off to create convenient paddocks or field enclosures. The 1773 depiction may simply be catching that process mid-course, the original form already being reshaped by farming practicalities. Today, no surface traces of any kind survive at the location.