In Ballynoe, County Kerry, a circular enclosure appeared clearly enough on the Ordnance Survey map of 1842 to be documented, yet by the time the 1916 edition was produced it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely, and nothing visible remains on the surface today.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, are typically enclosed farmsteads dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They were built as circular banks of earth, sometimes reinforced with stone, enclosing a domestic settlement and offering a degree of protection for livestock. Ireland once had tens of thousands of them, and a great many have been lost, particularly during the agricultural intensification of the nineteenth century, when land drainage, deep ploughing, and field consolidation removed earthworks that had survived for over a millennium. The seventy or so years between the two Ordnance Survey editions that bracket this site were precisely the period when such losses accelerated most sharply across Kerry and beyond. Whatever stood at Ballynoe was gone, or levelled beyond recognition, before the surveyors returned.