On a gentle rise in the bogland of Ballagh in County Galway, a ringfort once stood, and now nothing of it can be seen at all.

When a local observer named Neary noted it in 1914, the site had already retreated into near-absence. His description was spare: a circular, earthen fort of which only a mound remains. Ringforts, the most numerous class of monument in the Irish landscape, were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, their residents protected by one or more banks and ditches of earth or stone. In this case, even that reduced remnant, the mound Neary recorded over a century ago, has since disappeared from the surface entirely. The bog, patient and indifferent, appears to have finished what time began. A possible cashel base of gravel, recorded separately in the archaeological register, is associated with the site, though its relationship to the vanished fort remains unclear.