This one is notable for what does not. On the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map, a circular univallate ringfort, meaning a single-ditched enclosure of the kind that was once one of the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, is clearly marked near Carhoobeg in County Kerry. Visit the spot today, however, and there is nothing to see. No earthwork, no ridge in the grass, no fold in the ground that might hint at what was there. The pastureland runs flat and unremarkable toward the Laune river, and nobody in the area appears to recall the site at all.

Ringforts were typically built between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries, serving as enclosed farmsteads for individual family groups. Thousands once dotted the Irish landscape, and Kerry still holds a remarkable concentration of them. But attrition over the centuries, through agriculture, drainage, and the gradual levelling of inconvenient earthworks, has erased a great many. The Carhoobeg example is recorded in A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, where it appears as entry number 789. By the time that survey was compiled, there was already no surface trace left to document. The level pastureland west of the Laune had simply swallowed it.