A rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, is a circular earthwork enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or defended homestead. They number in their thousands across Ireland, a quiet geography of raised banks and ditches that has survived, in many cases, for over a thousand years. The one at Coolard in County Kerry did not survive. It was levelled in 1977 and 1978 to accommodate drainage schemes, leaving the land flat and the record bare.

The enclosure had appeared on Ordnance Survey maps as far back as the 1841 to 1842 survey, and was still present and marked on the 1939 revision, meaning it endured on paper across nearly a century of cartographic record. Its destruction in the late 1970s places it within a broader pattern of agricultural improvement during that period, when land drainage programmes, partly state-funded, reshaped significant areas of the Irish countryside. Ringforts, which can appear to a farmer as little more than awkward humps of ground interrupting otherwise workable land, were among the casualties. What the Coolard rath may have contained, whether internal features such as souterrains (underground stone-lined passages, often used for storage or refuge) or structural remains, was never formally excavated before the earthworks were removed.