At Cappanacush in County Kerry, a ringfort once stood within a short distance of a stream, its circular earthen enclosure marking out a defended farmstead of the early medieval period. By the time the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map was produced, the site had already been reduced to a footnote, marked simply as "site of", a cartographic shorthand for something that once was and no longer is. Today there is no physical trace of the enclosure at all, nor of the souterrain that accompanied it.

A souterrain, for those unfamiliar with the term, is an underground passage or chamber, typically constructed from stone, which was associated with ringforts and used for storage or refuge. At Cappanacush, the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map recorded both the circular enclosure and what the surveyors referred to as a "cave", their word for the souterrain. The accompanying field notes observed that the land around the site had been put to tillage and that the cave had been closed in. This is a pattern repeated across Ireland: agricultural improvement, particularly the breaking of pasture into arable land during the nineteenth century, accounts for the loss of countless earthworks that had survived relatively undisturbed for over a thousand years. The area is now described as dense vegetation, and the stream that once served as a nearby landmark remains the only consistent geographical reference point.

The Iveragh Peninsula, where Cappanacush sits, is documented in A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of South Kerry, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which catalogued the extraordinary density of prehistoric and early medieval remains across this part of the county. That this particular site did not survive long enough to be properly examined makes it a small but telling example of how the archaeological record is always, to some degree, a record of loss as much as survival.