The rath at Clonkill in County Westmeath belongs firmly to the second category. By the time aerial photography captured the ground in November 2011, nothing remained above the surface. The monument had been levelled entirely, leaving no earthwork, no trace of a bank, no hollow where a ditch once ran.

A rath, or ringfort, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more circular earthen banks and ditches, within which a family would have kept livestock and built their home. They are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, yet even common things can vanish. The Clonkill example appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, drawn as a roughly circular enclosure with a gravel pit already cutting into its southern quadrant. That pit is itself telling. Gravel extraction, along with agricultural improvement and land drainage, accounts for the disappearance of many such sites across the Irish midlands throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the time the 1837 map was made, the quarrying had already begun; at some point after that, whatever earthwork remained was removed altogether.

What is left is essentially a cartographic ghost, a shape that existed in surveyors' notebooks and on printed sheets long after it ceased to exist in the ground. The 1837 OS map was produced with considerable care and does record many features, field boundaries, and enclosures that have since disappeared, which makes it an important document for anyone trying to reconstruct how the Irish landscape once looked. The Clonkill rath is, in that sense, more useful as evidence of loss than as a monument in its own right, a small entry in the long account of what early medieval Ireland once contained.