Somewhere beneath a modern house and its outbuildings in Turnings, Co. Kildare, lies a ringfort that exists now only on paper. Ringforts, the circular enclosures typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, numbering in the tens of thousands across the country. This one has vanished entirely from the ground, swallowed by centuries of agricultural improvement and, eventually, by construction. What makes this particular site more than just another lost monument is what accompanied it on the historical map.

When the Ordnance Survey produced its first edition six-inch maps in 1838, surveyors recorded not only the main circular enclosure, estimated at roughly 70 metres in diameter, but also a second, far larger feature concentric with it. Shown as a dotted line on the map, this outer enclosure was estimated at approximately 400 metres in diameter, running from the east around to the north of the inner ringfort. The surveyors offered no firm interpretation of it, and its significance remains uncertain. A 400-metre enclosure of this kind would be remarkable by any measure, placing it in a category well beyond the ordinary farmstead ringfort, possibly suggesting a site of territorial, ceremonial, or high-status function. Whether it was ever a substantial earthwork or simply a field boundary of some antiquity, no one can now say with confidence. No visible surface trace of either feature survives today, the land having been levelled and improved to the point where even the inner bank has left no impression on the pasture.