At Corrafaireen in County Galway, a ringfort that once measured roughly sixty metres across has vanished so completely that nothing remains above ground. No earthen bank, no ditch, no trace of the circular enclosure that was clearly visible to the surveyors who mapped it on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in the nineteenth century. What was once a substantial feature on a low ridge in open grassland has been swallowed entirely by agricultural improvement.

Ringforts, known also as raths or cashels depending on whether they were built from earth or stone, were among the most common settlement types in early medieval Ireland, serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. The Corrafaireen example sat within a large area of rock outcrop, which makes its disappearance all the more striking, since stony ground often preserves such features by making them less convenient to clear. Land reclamation, however, is thorough work, and the site has been absorbed into improved pasture. The only surface evidence remaining today consists of two probable field-clearance cairns, the small mounds of gathered stone that farmers pile at the edges of fields when clearing ground for grazing or cultivation. These cairns are themselves a kind of accidental record, the debris of the same process that erased the monument they now stand near.