At Bedford in north County Kerry, a rath, which is the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, survives in only the most marginal sense. Its enclosing bank, once the defining feature of a working settlement, now rises to a maximum height of just 0.7 metres and spans about 4 metres in width. The interior measures roughly 12 metres north to south and 13.5 metres east to west, making it a modest example even by the standards of a monument type that numbers in the tens of thousands across Ireland. A small stream runs immediately to the south, and the whole thing sits in the corner of a field, the kind of location that tends to absorb and obscure earthworks over time.

What makes this site particularly stark is that its near-disappearance is not simply the result of centuries of slow erosion. According to the North Kerry Archaeological Survey compiled by C. Toal and published in 1995, the site was very much levelled during 1976 and 1977, a period when land improvement schemes and agricultural mechanisation accounted for the destruction of a great many such monuments across the Irish countryside. The damage done in those two years reduced a feature that would once have presented a meaningful bank and possibly a fosse, an outer ditch, to something barely distinguishable at ground level. What remains is essentially the ghost of a plan, a circular smudge in a Kerry field beside a stream.