At Mountcoal in County Kerry, a ringfort, or rath, a roughly circular enclosure of earthen banks that would once have enclosed a farmstead in early medieval Ireland, has left behind so little that its very existence remains qualified by the word "possible". There is nothing to see here. That, in a quiet way, is precisely what makes it worth noting.

The only documentary trace appears on the Ordnance Survey map edition of 1914 to 1915, where slight markings suggest the outline of an enclosure. The earlier OS edition carries no such marking, which means the feature either escaped the attention of earlier surveyors or had already degraded to near-invisibility by the time of the first systematic mapping. By the time C. Toal recorded the site in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, no visible trace survived on the ground at all. What remains is essentially a cartographic ghost, a mark on a map made during a window of perhaps a few decades when just enough earthwork persisted to catch a surveyor's eye.