In the townland of Ballynagare in north County Kerry, a circular earthwork once stood to the north-east of two neighbouring ringforts, and today there is nothing left of it at all. Not a bank, not a ditch, not a raised seam in the field. The rath, as this type of enclosure is known in Irish, was a farmstead form typical of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, built up as an earthen or stone boundary ring around a family's dwelling and outbuildings. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one does not.

What makes the Ballynagare site quietly significant is its paper trail. It appears on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842, meaning it was still recognisable as a distinct feature at that point, a visible circular enclosure that surveyors considered worth recording. It appears again on the 1914 to 1915 revision, suggesting it persisted into the early twentieth century. At some point after that, it disappeared entirely, levelled into the surrounding farmland. The site is documented in C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which places it in relation to two other nearby enclosures, themselves separately recorded, hinting at a small cluster of early settlement in this part of Kerry that has otherwise left almost no trace above ground.