Where a ringfort once occupied the summit of a low rise just east of the Ardsheelhane river, the ground is now smooth agricultural land, with no earthwork, no bank, no ditch remaining to suggest what stood there. It is a place that exists more fully in cartographic memory than in the landscape itself.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were enclosed farmsteads typically defined by one or more circular earthen banks and ditches, and they were built throughout Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth century. Thousands survive across the country, but this one did not. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey map recorded a circular enclosure here, a recognisable form that surveyors knew well. By the time the second edition was produced, the notation had quietly changed to "site of", that blunt cartographic admission that something has been lost. An 1896 field note confirms what happened: the site had been levelled, the land given over to pasture. The process was common throughout the nineteenth century, when agricultural improvement and land consolidation led to the destruction of countless such monuments across Ireland.

What remains is essentially a coordinate and a map reference, the ghost of a settlement whose occupants, perhaps a farming family of middling status, would have lived within a bank-enclosed yard somewhere on this gentle rise above the river. The Iveragh Peninsula, of which Kealariddig forms a small part, is dense with archaeological survivals, which makes the erasure of this one feel all the more pointed.