At Martramane on the south-western shore of Tralee Bay, a ringfort once occupied a gentle south-facing slope with views across the water. Known locally as Daitheens Fort, it was the kind of site that had probably endured for well over a thousand years, a quiet earthwork worn smooth by centuries of weather and grazing. Then, sometime in the years before 1986, it was levelled to make way for a house.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are among the most common field monuments in Ireland, circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches that served as farmsteads during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Many thousands survive, scattered across almost every county. Daitheens Fort, recorded in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, was one of the more southerly examples in this part of Kerry, sitting on that gentle slope above the bay. The local name suggests it was remembered in oral tradition long after its original function had been forgotten, attached instead to some figure called Daitheen, whose identity is now as lost as the earthwork itself.

What makes the site notable is precisely its absence. The monument was already gone by the time it entered the formal record, documented in the survey as a recent casualty rather than a surviving feature. It serves as a reminder of how routinely such sites were erased during the twentieth century, and of how much the survival of any individual ringfort depended on nothing more than the accident of what was built, or not built, on the land around it.