The rath at Kilpatrick in Co. Westmeath belongs firmly to the second category. A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically built during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead. At Kilpatrick, even that much has almost entirely vanished. What remains is essentially a ghost in the grass, a roughly circular cropmark about thirty metres in diameter, visible in aerial photography as a faint variation in the colour of vegetation where the old bank and ditch once disturbed the soil beneath.

The site sits on sloping ground above a marshy valley to the north-west, and it is not an isolated curiosity in this landscape. Another ringfort lies roughly 140 metres to the south, and a moated site, a type of enclosed farmstead more commonly associated with Anglo-Norman settlers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, sits around 195 metres to the north-west. The clustering suggests this was once a fairly well-settled pocket of ground. What makes the Kilpatrick rath particularly telling, though, is its absence from the historical map record. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, nor on the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913. By the time anyone looked carefully, the earthworks had already been levelled. A field inspection in 1983 recorded only the faint circular outline of a recently disturbed area, with evidence of significant fence clearance and land reclamation nearby. The implication is clear enough: the monument had been destroyed within living memory of that visit, its banks pushed flat and its ditches filled in during the kind of agricultural improvement that reshaped so much of the Irish midlands in the mid-twentieth century.

Today the site is detectable mainly through differential crop growth, the subtle way that disturbed subsoil affects the plants above it, producing those slightly different shades that show up in aerial or satellite imagery long after the surface has been smoothed over. It is the kind of place that rewards looking at a screen as much as walking a field.