There is something quietly deflating about a site that has been mapped twice and excavated once, only to yield almost nothing. In a field near Lackandarra in County Waterford, what was once recorded as a circular embanked enclosure of roughly 45 to 50 metres in diameter has been reduced, over time, to slight intermittent traces of a bank. A rath, as this type of ringfort is commonly known, is an earthwork enclosure typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, often the remains of a farmstead surrounded by one or more earthen banks. Thousands survive across the country in various states. This one sits on level pasture ground and barely announces itself.

The site appears on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a clearly defined circular enclosure. By the time the 1927 edition was surveyed, the record had already diminished to an arc of a bank running roughly south-west to north-east, the circle no longer fully legible in the landscape. In 2004, archaeological testing carried out just to the south-east of the site failed to produce any material that could be connected to it. Emer Purcell, reporting on the excavation in 2007, recorded no archaeological significance for the area tested. What had once seemed worth marking on a map had, by that point, left no recoverable trace.