At Cloonlara in County Galway, a ringfort once occupied a ridge in gently rolling grassland, a circular enclosure roughly 35 metres across. No trace of it is visible today. No bank, no ditch, no scatter of stone. The site survives only as a mark on a map.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, typically the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval families, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. This one in Cloonlara does not. It was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which was produced in the nineteenth century and remains a foundational document for tracing landscape features that have since disappeared. By the time Knight noted the site around 1975, no surface evidence remained. What erased it, and when, is not recorded.