A rath is a type of circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period in Ireland, used as a farmstead or defended homestead. This particular example survives only as a mark on a nineteenth-century map.

The enclosure was recorded in the townland of Ballymacandrew North on the Ordnance Survey map of 1841 to 1842. By the time the later edition was produced in 1916, the townland boundaries in the area had been redrawn, and the ringfort itself had disappeared from the cartographic record entirely. No surface trace remains on the ground today. What happened to it in the intervening decades is not known. Earthworks of this kind were frequently levelled during agricultural improvement, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the expansion of tillage and pasture saw thousands of similar sites removed across the country. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, catalogued the site from the earlier map evidence, preserving at least the record of its existence even where the physical reality had long since gone.

There is nothing to see at Ballymacandrew today, and that is precisely what makes it worth knowing about. It stands as a reminder, if not in earth then in ink, that the landscape of Kerry was once considerably more densely marked by these enclosures than anything visible on the ground would now suggest.