At Ballyeagh in County Kerry, a ringfort once existed that is now entirely gone, levelled sometime around the turn of the twentieth century until not a trace of it survives above ground. Its absence is, in a quiet way, the whole story.

A ringfort, or rath, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically bounded by one or more circular earthen banks and ditches. They are among the most common monument types in the Irish landscape, numbering in the tens of thousands, and their survival in such quantities is partly a result of folk belief that disturbing them brought misfortune. The Ballyeagh example was recorded as a circular enclosure on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842, and was still visible, at least in outline, when those maps were revised again in 1914 to 1915. Somewhere in the intervening decades or shortly thereafter, it was levelled, most likely to bring the land into agricultural use. The OS maps therefore serve as its only surviving record, a pair of cartographic snapshots bracketing its final years.