There is a particular melancholy to a monument that was recorded and then erased within fifteen years. In 1972, a substantial rath sat on a gentle north-facing slope just below the summit of a hill in Greatrath, County Kildare. A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically surrounded by a circular earthen bank and ditch. This one was larger than most, measuring roughly 125 metres in diameter, enclosed by an irregular earthen bank that rose about 1.2 metres above the interior ground level. Traces of an outer fosse, a defensive ditch, were still visible on the eastern side, and two significant depressions marked the interior, one in the south-west sector interpreted as the result of quarrying, and a smaller one near the northern section of the enclosing bank.

By 1987, it was gone. The monument had been levelled, leaving no visible surface trace whatsoever. The very townland name, Greatrath, almost certainly preserves a memory of the site, "rath" being the Irish word for such an enclosure, and the prefix suggesting something of scale or prominence. The enclosure's diameter of 125 metres would have placed it among the larger examples of its type in the region, which makes its disappearance in the intervening decade and a half all the more striking. Quarrying activity was already eating into it when surveyors visited in 1972, and that process appears to have continued until nothing remained above ground.