The possible rath at Lissavane, in County Kerry, manages something rather different: it has all but disappeared. Standing in the paddock of an old farmyard, just north of a farm road, there is nothing at ground level to suggest that anything of historical significance is beneath your feet. What you see instead is an uneven earthen mound, roughly eighteen metres across and just over a metre high, smothered in nettles, high grass, and manure. A curving wall skirts its eastern edge, and that is more or less the extent of what is visible.

A rath, to use the Irish term, was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks, used as a farmstead or high-status residence during the early medieval period. The Lissavane example was, according to the landowner, a small circular fort with an earthen bank. The 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records it rather more generously, showing a circular enclosure with a diameter of around twenty-five metres, crossed by a field boundary running northwest to southeast. That boundary, drawn across the enclosure sometime before or during the mid-nineteenth century, is likely part of why so little survives today. Fields reshape themselves around the needs of successive generations, and ancient earthworks are among the first casualties.