On a gentle north-eastward slope in County Galway, overlooking Lough Loung, there once stood a large circular enclosure roughly 65 metres across. Today, the only physical evidence is a broad hollow in the grassland, the kind of depression that takes a moment to read correctly, the land having settled where something once stood or was dug.

The enclosure was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which places its documentation somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century, when surveyors methodically charted features that were already ancient. Circular enclosures of this kind, sometimes called raths or ringforts depending on their construction, were a common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch surrounding a farmstead or homestead. At around 65 metres in diameter, this one would have been a reasonably substantial example. At some point between that first mapping and the present day, the surface traces were lost entirely, to agriculture, weathering, or both. What survived was the name, passed along in the ordinary way that local memory preserves things that maps and monuments do not.