Levelled at some point over the course of the late twentieth century, it has been absorbed into the surrounding farmland so thoroughly that no earthwork or bank survives to mark it out. And yet, from the air, the ghost of it remains. Aerial photography taken by the Geological Survey of Ireland in 1974 still picks up the circular outline, a faint but legible trace pressed into the ground, proof that erasure and survival can amount to the same thing.

A rath, the term used across Ireland for an earthen ringfort, was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more banks and ditches, used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period. Thousands once dotted the Irish countryside, and a significant number survive in Kerry. This particular example appeared as a clear circular enclosure on Ordnance Survey maps from the 1841 to 1842 survey, and was still recognisable on the revised edition of 1915 to 1916, though by that later date a fieldbank had already begun to encroach on its southern sector. That incremental cutting away, one generation's field boundary quietly crossing an older monument, captures something of how so many such sites have been lost, not in a single act but by slow degrees.