At Kilcanway in County Cork, a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across once occupied the landscape, the kind of earthwork that would have functioned as a rath, an enclosed farmstead typical of early medieval Ireland, defined by one or more banks and ditches encircling a domestic interior. Today there is nothing to see at ground level. The site has been entirely removed by quarrying.

The enclosure appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, drawn as a clear circular feature with a quarry immediately to its north. That proximity tells its own story. At some point after the map was made, the quarrying expanded far enough to consume the site altogether. Whether the rath had already been partially disturbed before the cartographers recorded it is unknown, though the fact that they noted it at all suggests it was still legible in the landscape at that date. Raths are among the most numerous monument types in Ireland, with tens of thousands once scattered across the country, yet a significant proportion have been lost to agriculture, development, and extraction over the past two centuries. Kilcanway is one such loss, surviving now only as a circle of ink on a sheet of nineteenth-century paper.