This one is remarkable for what it no longer is. At Higginstown in County Kilkenny, a ringfort once stood that has since been so thoroughly erased from the landscape that no trace of it survives above ground, and satellite imagery confirms nothing remains to be seen. What we know of it survives largely in old maps and a single unpublished account, making it a site defined almost entirely by absence.

A ringfort, or rath, is one of the most common monument types in Ireland, typically a circular area enclosed by an earthen bank and external ditch, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period. The Higginstown example was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 as a circular enclosure roughly 42 metres in overall diameter, a reasonably substantial example of the type. By the time the map was revised around 1900, only the western portion of the outline was being marked, suggesting the monument had already been significantly reduced or levelled in the intervening decades. A 1981 unpublished account by Doyle described the site plainly: it was "no longer there," with a note that local memory held it to have been about thirty yards wide, surrounded by a shallow trench. That shallow ditch, the defining external feature of a rath, had evidently been filled in along with the rest of it. The sequence is a familiar one in the Irish countryside, where agricultural improvement, land clearance, and changing ownership gradually wore away thousands of such monuments across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leaving only cartographic shadows behind.