That is the blunt story behind this ringfort in Ballymacandrew, County Kerry, where a search for buried treasure resulted in the near-destruction of a site that had stood for well over a thousand years.

The fort is what archaeologists call a univallate rath, meaning it was enclosed by a single earthen bank and ditch rather than the multiple concentric rings found at more elaborate examples. With an internal diameter of roughly 46 metres east to west, it would have been a substantial enclosure, likely the defended farmstead of an early medieval family of some local standing. At some point in the years before the site was surveyed for the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, the bank was heavily levelled. The motivation, apparently, was a belief that gold lay buried beneath it. The digging yielded nothing, and the rath, which had commanded excellent views in all directions from its slightly elevated position, was left considerably reduced, its sub-circular platform now rising only about a metre above the surrounding land. A fieldbank running east to west cuts across its northern side, adding a further layer of disruption to what remains.

The belief that gold or other valuables are concealed beneath ringforts is not unusual in Ireland. Such sites accumulated centuries of folklore associating them with the otherworld, with fairy inhabitants, and with hidden wealth, and that mythology occasionally had practical consequences. In this case, the consequences were irreversible. The earthwork can still be read in the landscape, but what once stood as a legible piece of early medieval Kerry is now a flattened remnant, altered not by agriculture or urban development but by a very old and very human impulse.