At Tullig in County Kerry, on a south-east-facing slope that looks out towards Mangerton Mountain, there is a rath, a type of early medieval enclosed farmstead typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, that has been so thoroughly flattened by centuries of agricultural use that it leaves no visible trace on the surface. The land is pasture now, and a visitor walking across it would have no reason to suspect anything was underfoot.

The site survives in the cartographic record rather than the physical one. Both the 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map and the revised edition produced between 1893 and 1894 show a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter at this location, which is consistent with the smaller end of the typical rath range. That two separate surveys, half a century apart, recorded the feature suggests it was still legible to cartographers working in the field, even if time and tillage have since done away with whatever earthworks remained. Raths of this kind were the basic unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, serving as enclosed homesteads for farming families, and thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. This one, sitting on a natural break in the slope, occupies the kind of position that early farmers favoured, offering drainage, outlook, and a degree of defensibility.