The ringfort at Liscullane, in north Kerry, does neither. It has been levelled so completely that it is invisible to anyone standing in the field, yet from the air it reappears as a ghost, a circular soil mark pressed faintly into the earth like an old scar. That quality of being simultaneously gone and still present gives the site an odd, quietly unsettling character.

A rath, as ringforts of this earthen type are generally known, was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defended residence. The example at Liscullane, whose Irish name is Lios Coileáin, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842, and again on the 1916 revision, suggesting it still retained some visible form well into the twentieth century. By 1968, when the Air Corps carried out aerial photography of the area, the banks had been ploughed or cleared away entirely, yet the circular outline remained legible as a crop or soil mark, the kind of faint discolouration in the earth that aerial photography is particularly good at catching. The site was documented in C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which drew together evidence for monuments across this part of the county.