At Ballyeagh in County Kerry, a possible ringfort, the kind of circular earthen enclosure, sometimes called a rath, that was a common feature of early medieval Irish settlement, existed long enough to be mapped and then vanished without leaving so much as a raised bank or a hollow in the ground. It is, in every meaningful sense, a monument to absence.

The enclosure appeared on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, rendered in the cartographic shorthand of hachures, small lines used to indicate raised or sloped ground, sitting immediately to the north of Ballyeagh House. When later editions of the same map were produced, it was gone, both from the landscape and from the cartography. The site was levelled around the turn of the twentieth century, most likely during agricultural improvement or landscaping associated with the nearby house. Archaeological investigations carried out in 1991 found nothing of significance beneath the surface, meaning that whatever the enclosure once was, and a ringfort is only described here as a possibility, it left no readable trace in the soil either. The record exists; the place does not.