At Knockbounce in County Kildare, there is a site that exists more as an absence than a presence. A rath, the term used in Irish archaeology for a ringfort, typically a circular earthen enclosure dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or defended homestead, was clearly marked on Taylor's 1783 Map of County Kildare. By the time the Ordnance Survey came to map the same ground in the nineteenth century and in every revision since, it had simply vanished from the record.

The gap between Taylor's map and the OS surveys points to something happening in the intervening decades. Quarrying is known to have been carried out in the area, and it is plausible that the earthworks were gradually cut away and removed in the process. When trial trenching was carried out in advance of a motorway scheme, no archaeological material came to light, which deepens the suspicion that whatever once stood here was not merely obscured or forgotten but physically destroyed. Keeley, writing in 1991, noted the likelihood with a telling question mark, the punctuation itself a small acknowledgement that certainty is impossible when the evidence has been carted away in lorry loads of stone.