At Rahard in County Galway, a cashel, a type of stone ringfort enclosed by a drystone wall rather than an earthen bank, once sat in open grassland. By the time anyone thought to look carefully, it was already nearly gone, and now it is gone entirely, levelled by field clearance until no surface trace of it, or any of its associated features, remains.

When Cody recorded the site in 1989, what survived was already in poor condition. The cashel measured roughly 39 metres east to west and 36 metres north to south, its defining wall long since collapsed. Inside the eastern half of the enclosure, two almost parallel stony banks ran from west-southwest to east-northeast, grass-covered and fading into the surrounding ground. A low mound of earth and stone, around three metres by three metres, sat nearby. These interior features are the kind that archaeologists read carefully, since they sometimes indicate subdivisions within a settlement, outbuildings, or earlier phases of use. Whatever story they held, it was already difficult to read in 1989, and subsequent field clearance removed what little was left.

Cashels are particularly associated with the west of Ireland, where stone was more readily available than the material needed for earthen raths. They functioned as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and many across the country survive in reasonable condition. The one at Rahard did not. It is now, in the strict archaeological sense, a destroyed monument, recorded in the literature but invisible on the ground, a place that can only be visited in an archive.