Some places earn their place in the historical record precisely because they no longer exist. At Curryhills in County Kildare, a circular ringfort once sat near the southern foot of a gently sloping field, its earthen bank marking out a space that would have been immediately legible to any early medieval observer. A ringfort, typically a farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, and thousands survive across the country. This one does not.

When surveyors visited the site in 1972, the fort was still physically present but practically inaccessible, its bank so thickly smothered in bushes and briars that a proper record could not be made. That dense overgrowth, frustrating as it was at the time, turned out to be the closest thing the site had to a guardian. By the time of a revisit in 1986, the vegetation had been cleared as part of land improvement works, and the monument had been levelled along with it. No visible surface traces survive today. The field at Curryhills shows nothing of what once stood there, and without the partial notation from 1972, even the rough outline of the bank would be unrecorded.