That is more or less the situation at Lisnaslat, a ringfort in Ardrahan, County Kerry, whose Irish name, Lios na Slat, translates as the ringfort of the rods. Whether those rods referred to woven wattle fencing, boundary markers, or something else entirely is now impossible to say with certainty. What is certain is that the earthwork once existed, that cartographers recorded it in 1841 to 1842 and again in 1898, and that at some point between the later of those surveys and the present day it was levelled so thoroughly that no surface trace survives.

Ringforts, which were circular enclosures typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, numbering in the tens of thousands across the country. Lisnaslat was one such enclosure, ordinary enough in type if not in name, and its presence on both the mid-nineteenth-century and late-nineteenth-century maps suggests it was still a legible feature of the landscape well into the period of modern land improvement. Its disappearance is a familiar story in Irish archaeology; agricultural consolidation, drainage schemes, and the pressure to bring marginal ground into production erased enormous numbers of these sites across the twentieth century, leaving their names and outlines preserved in maps and field surveys rather than in the ground itself.