Others vanish entirely, removed not by time or weather but by a single tenant with a spade and, as one early source put it, no taste for the antique. On a ridge in undulating grassland near Shrule in County Galway, there is now no visible surface trace of what was once a rath, the earthen ringfort that had stood here long enough to acquire a local name: Comer's Fort.

Raths are among the most common field monuments in Ireland, low circular earthworks typically defined by one or more banks and ditches, enclosing a domestic or agricultural space. They belong broadly to the early medieval period, though many were reused or modified across centuries. This particular example was recorded by Neary in 1914, who noted its local name and the blunt fact of its destruction: the occupying tenant had dug it over completely. Somewhere beneath the disturbed ground, there was also a probable souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber often associated with raths and thought to have served for storage or concealment. Whether that feature survived the digging, or what it may have contained, is unknown.

What remains is essentially a place where something once was. The ridge it occupied is still there, the grassland rolls on around it, but the monument itself exists now only in a name, a grid reference, and a dry, slightly exasperated sentence written down more than a century ago.