In the townland of Rathdown in County Wicklow, a circular enclosure roughly 46 metres in diameter was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey map, suggesting the one-time presence of a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that once dotted the Irish countryside in their thousands during the early medieval period. By the time the 1937 six-inch map was drawn, the area carried the placename Knockrath, a compound that likely preserves a memory of the feature itself, "rath" being the Irish word for a ringfort. But the earthwork itself appears to have already been gone.

When the surrounding area was developed in 1989, investigators found no physical evidence of the enclosure at all. The site had been levelled so thoroughly that nothing remained to confirm what the old cartographic record had suggested. Knockrath, then, is a placename that outlived its subject, a geographical label still pointing at something that no longer existed to be pointed at. The first edition Ordnance Survey maps, produced in Ireland from the 1830s onwards, captured a landscape still bearing features that would soon be lost to agriculture and construction, and this small Wicklow enclosure is one of the quieter casualties of that process.