At Ballyeagh in north County Kerry, what was once a rath, an earthen ringfort of the kind built across Ireland during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead enclosure, has been reduced to the faintest trace on the ground. It is less a monument now than an absence, a place where something once stood and was quietly removed.

The site has an unusual cartographic history. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey maps produced in 1841 and 1842, which is itself curious, since those surveys were generally thorough in recording earthworks still visible at the time. It does show up on a later edition, marked as a circular enclosure, which suggests it survived long enough to be captured in a subsequent survey pass. Somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century, however, the site was levelled, most likely as farmland was cleared or improved. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, records only a very slight trace remaining by that point. What the levelling removed, and what the earlier map-makers may have missed or overlooked, is now impossible to say with certainty.