At Dromkeen in County Kerry, there was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which is a circular earthen enclosure typically used as a farmstead during the early medieval period. It existed clearly enough to be mapped by the Ordnance Survey in 1841 to 1842, its outline captured in that meticulous national survey at a moment when many such monuments were already under pressure from land improvement and agricultural expansion. By the time the next major edition appeared in 1916, it was gone from the map entirely, and today no visible trace remains on the ground.

The sequence of those two surveys tells a familiar story across rural Ireland. The mid-nineteenth century OS mapping caught thousands of earthworks that would not last another few generations, and the Dromkeen rath is one of them. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded it on the basis of that cartographic evidence alone, situating it to the north-east of two other recorded monuments in the same area. Without surviving earthworks or excavation, little more can be said about its age, its size, or who once lived within its banks. It becomes, in the record, a shape on an old map and a set of grid references pointing at an ordinary field.