A univallate rath, meaning a ringfort enclosed by a single earthen bank and ditch, once occupied this patch of north Kerry farmland, but it was levelled at some point and the ground swallowed it so completely that no surface trace remains. Walk across the field today and you would have no reason to pause. The only way to know the place was ever there is to look down from the air.

The rath appears on Ordnance Survey maps from both 1841 to 1842 and 1914 to 1915, which tells us it was still present and recognisable well into the early twentieth century. At some point after that second survey it was removed, most likely to bring the land into fuller agricultural use, a fate that befell a great many of Ireland's ringforts during the twentieth century. Ringforts of this type were typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and functioned as enclosed farmsteads, the bank and ditch providing a degree of protection for a household and its livestock. At Lahesheragh, all of that is gone from the surface. What rescues the site from complete obscurity is aerial photography: the Geological Survey of Ireland's aerial photographs show the rath's outline quite clearly, its circular form preserved as a cropmark or soil difference that the eye on the ground cannot detect but the camera from above can read without difficulty.