At Downings in County Kildare, there is a site that has been quietly disappearing from the landscape for at least two centuries. Recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 as a roughly circular feature with an estimated diameter of around 40 metres, it carried the simple label "Rath", the Irish word for a ringfort, those circular enclosures of bank and ditch that were built in their thousands across Ireland, primarily during the early medieval period, and which served as farmsteads for families of varying status.

By 1972, a field survey described it as a roughly oval platform-type ringfort, measuring approximately 50 metres east to west and 27 metres north to south, set on a slight natural rise. A platform ringfort is a variant in which the enclosed interior sits raised above the surrounding ground, built up rather than scooped out, and this one apparently had no surviving bank or fosse, the ditch that would normally ring the outside of such an enclosure. Even that description proved optimistic. When the site was visited again in 1986, nothing remained but a low rise in the ground. The earthwork itself had gone, absorbed into the working landscape around it, leaving only the faintest topographical suggestion that something had once stood there.