On a low natural rise in the grassland of Tomany Beg in County Galway, a ringfort once stood that has been so thoroughly swallowed by the working landscape around it that when someone went looking for it in July 1983, the only hint of its existence was a slight curve in a field boundary to the north.

A rath, as ringforts of this type are generally known, was an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches forming a roughly circular boundary. The one at Tomany Beg was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838 as a subcircular enclosure measuring approximately 37 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and around 30 metres across from northwest to southeast. It reappeared on the OS 1:2500 plan surveyed between 1912 and 1916, still legible enough to map. Somewhere between that survey and 1983, a field boundary was laid down across the northern arc of the enclosure, running from northwest to northeast, and the rath's own banks were either levelled or left to subside until nothing remained above the grass. What the nineteenth-century cartographers had carefully traced had, by the late twentieth century, left almost no physical mark.

What makes the site particularly striking in its context is that it did not disappear into isolation. Two further raths lie approximately 105 metres and 175 metres to the east, suggesting that this corner of south Galway was once a cluster of neighbouring farmsteads, each enclosed within its own earthen ring. The one at Tomany Beg is the westernmost and the most thoroughly erased, surviving now only as a cartographic memory and a faint inflection in a field boundary that most people walking past would never think to question.