A ringfort near Ballyegan in County Kerry belongs firmly to the second category. When Ordnance Survey mappers visited the area in 1841 and 1842, they recorded a complete circular enclosure, the kind of earthwork known in Irish as a rath, typically a raised bank and ditch enclosing a farmstead or homestead from the early medieval period. By the time a later OS edition was produced, only a partial arc along the western sector remained visible. Today, nothing at all can be seen above ground.

The trajectory from whole enclosure to partial arc to no surface trace at all tells a familiar story of agricultural land improvement, decades of ploughing, and general attrition. Ringforts of this type were once enormously common across Ireland, numbering in the tens of thousands, but a great many were levelled during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as farming practices intensified. What makes this particular site useful as a record is precisely the sequence captured across different map editions, showing the stages of erasure rather than simply its endpoint. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, catalogued the site and preserved that comparative picture, even after the physical evidence had gone.