At Dromkeen in County Kerry, a ringfort, or rath, was recorded on Ordnance Survey maps as far back as 1841 to 1842, and again on the 1916 edition, yet today the site has vanished from the landscape almost entirely. A rath is a circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period, that would have served as a defended farmstead for a family of some local standing. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one does not.

What remains at Dromkeen is subtler than an absence. Disturbances in the soil of the field in question hint at something that was once there, the kind of faint unevenness that a plough or a drainage scheme can reduce a monument to over generations. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, placed the site one field to the south-east of a neighbouring recorded monument, and that spatial detail is now among the more concrete things that can be said about it. The two Ordnance Survey maps, separated by roughly seventy-five years, confirm that the enclosure was still visible, or at least traceable, well into the twentieth century before whatever process of erasure finally completed itself.