At Muckenagh in north Kerry, a circular earthwork enclosure, the kind known in Irish as a rath, once occupied the landscape much as thousands of others do across the country. A rath is typically an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built to shelter a family and their livestock. This one, however, has been reduced to almost nothing. A tiny section of the northern bank survives, absorbed into an ordinary field boundary, and that is essentially all that remains above ground.

The enclosure appears on Ordnance Survey maps from 1841 to 1842, clearly intact enough at that point to be recorded as a feature of the landscape. By the 1916 edition, something had already begun to change: a bohareen, a narrow rural laneway, had been driven through the northern and eastern sides of the site. That small road, cutting across what would once have been the bank and possibly the interior, set in motion the gradual erasure documented by C. Toal in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995. By the time that survey was compiled, the site was described as levelled, with only the fragment of northern bank left to mark what had been there.