At Ballybroman in north County Kerry, a large circular enclosure once occupied the south-eastern corner of a field, its earthen banks substantial enough to be recorded by Ordnance Survey cartographers during their mid-nineteenth-century mapping work. Today, nothing remains above ground. The site is, in the plainest terms, gone.

A rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They were once among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, numbering in the tens of thousands. The Ballybroman example was recorded on both the 1841 to 1842 Ordnance Survey maps and again on the 1898 revision, meaning it survived, at least partially, into the late Victorian period. At some point after that second mapping, it was levelled entirely, most likely through agricultural clearance, a fate that has befallen a significant proportion of Ireland's ringforts over the past century and a half. What made this one notable, beyond its size, was simply that it was there and then, without ceremony or record of its removal, it was not.