Somewhere in the level pasture of Ardellis in County Kildare, there is a ringfort that has essentially ceased to exist above ground, though it has never quite disappeared from the record. A rath, as this type of enclosure is commonly known, was a roughly circular earthwork of banked earth used during the early medieval period as a farmstead or defended homestead. Thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one does not survive at all, at least not visibly.

The Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, surveyed in the nineteenth century, recorded the site as a circular enclosed area with an estimated internal diameter of around 26 metres, defined by a bank. That cartographic trace is now the primary evidence that anything was ever here. Subsequent agricultural improvement of the land, the kind of gradual levelling and drainage that has reshaped so much of the Irish midlands, has removed whatever earthwork once marked the spot. No visible surface trace remains.