At Tulaigh Fhialáin in County Kerry, a circular enclosure was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map, that meticulous nineteenth-century effort to fix the Irish landscape in ink and grid lines. The enclosure existed clearly enough, at some point, to be worth marking down. Today, the area is heavily afforested, and fieldworkers who went looking for it found nothing at all.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a common feature of the Irish countryside, often the remains of a ráth or ringfort, an enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. They were built in their tens of thousands across Ireland, defined by an earthen bank and ditch, and were the basic unit of rural settlement for centuries. The one at Tulaigh Fhialáin was noted by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which catalogued the remarkable density of such monuments across south Kerry. Whether this particular example was already degraded by the time the surveyors visited, or whether the plantation of trees had simply buried or disturbed whatever earthworks remained, is not recorded.