This one earns its place by having vanished entirely. At Ballinena in County Limerick, there was once a rath, a type of circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead or place of habitual settlement during the early medieval period, typically defined by a raised bank and ditch. By the time anyone thought to look for it on the ground, there was nothing left to see.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1841, recorded as an embanked circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately twenty metres, positioned immediately south-west of a public road. That map, produced as part of the great nineteenth-century surveying effort that documented Ireland's landscape in extraordinary detail, captured the rath at a moment when it was apparently still legible in the terrain. What happened between that recording and the modern inspection is not precisely documented, but the outcome is clear enough. When Denis Power compiled the site notes, uploaded in August 2011, the monument had been levelled and no trace of it remained visible. A cottage and outhouses were found to occupy approximately the area where the enclosure once stood.

There is, practically speaking, nothing to visit in the conventional sense. The site sits beside a public road in Ballinena, and the footprint of the vanished rath is now domestic ground, built over and absorbed into the working landscape of a rural holding. What makes the detour worthwhile, if one happens to be in the area, is the thought the place provokes rather than anything it presents to the eye. The 1841 OS map, freely available through the OSi historical mapping archive, shows the enclosure as a clear circular feature, and toggling between that layer and the present-day satellite view makes the transformation legible in a way that standing at the roadside alone cannot. The monument is gone, but the gap it leaves in the record is its own kind of presence.