On the 1909 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a small circular enclosure is clearly marked near Moone in County Kildare, its bank tracing a ring roughly thirty metres across. Enclosures of this kind, defined by an earthen or stone bank encircling a roughly circular area, are among the most common monument types in the Irish landscape, and their functions varied considerably: some were ringforts serving as enclosed farmsteads, others had ritual or funerary purposes. Whatever its original character, the Moone example was precise enough and prominent enough to be recorded by the cartographers of the early twentieth century.

By 1972, however, it was gone. A note made that year records the monument as destroyed, the ground having been turned over to pasture. This is not an unusual fate. The decades following Irish independence saw considerable agricultural improvement across the country, and many earthworks that had survived for centuries were levelled during that period as land was drained, ploughed, and reseeded. What the 1909 map preserves, then, is a kind of last photograph, the outline of something that existed long enough to be drawn but not long enough to be protected.