At Rahoneen in north County Kerry, nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey cartographers recorded a circular enclosure on both the 1842 and 1897 editions of their maps, careful enough draughtsmen to mark a feature that even then may have been little more than a low earthen ring in a field. Today, no surface trace remains. The enclosure exists only as an absence, a place defined entirely by what has disappeared from it.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a common enough category in the Irish archaeological landscape, most of them the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that were the basic unit of rural settlement throughout the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They survive in their thousands across the country, and yet they vanish too, lost to centuries of tillage, land improvement, and the slow redistribution of earthworks by plough and weather. The Rahoneen example was documented by C. Toal in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which catalogued sites across the region and noted the enclosure's appearance on both map editions. The gap between 1842 and 1897 suggests it was still considered worth recording fifty-five years later, though what remained of it physically by either date is impossible now to say.