In the townland of Rareagh in north County Kerry, a circular enclosure appeared faithfully on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842 and again on the revised edition of 1898, but at some point between that second mapping and the present day it was levelled entirely. No earthwork, no crop mark visible to a passing eye, no ridge underfoot remains to suggest that anything was ever there.

Circular enclosures of this kind are generally understood to be the remains of early medieval ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that once dotted the Irish countryside in their tens of thousands. Constructed typically of an earthen bank and fosse, a ringfort would have enclosed a homestead and offered a degree of protection for livestock and family. The Rareagh example was recorded by C. Toal in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which catalogued just how many such sites in the region had already been lost to agricultural improvement, land drainage, and decades of heavy machinery. That this particular enclosure was still visible, at least as a legible feature, as late as 1898 makes its subsequent disappearance all the more pointed. It crossed a threshold sometime in the twentieth century from a living landscape feature into a cartographic ghost.