There is something quietly melancholy about a site that exists mainly as a record of its own disappearance. At Portgloriam in County Kildare, a rath once occupied a circular area roughly 41 metres across. A rath, or ringfort, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and an outer ditch, and thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one does not survive at all.

The monument was levelled in 1954, a period when agricultural improvement schemes and the expansion of tillage led to the destruction of many such earthworks across the country. By 1972, what remained was described as a scarcely visible circular area defined by a shallow fosse, the outer ditch that would once have bounded the enclosure, and even that could only be traced with difficulty. A decade or so later, by 1985, the site was under tillage and had ceased to be visible at ground level entirely. The sequence is a familiar one in Irish archaeology, though no less stark for that: levelling, then fading, then nothing.