The one at Brackloon in County Mayo has been reduced to something closer to a ghost. A disused sandpit has consumed most of the eastern half of the interior, and modern field fences cut across what little of the original outline survives. What remains is an exercise in reading a landscape for faint signals: a low scarp curving gently from south-west to north-west, a slight hollow where a sunken trackway runs on a north-east to south-west axis, and some very faint traces of a bank at the south-east. The site sits in ordinary pasture, with the ground dropping away towards wet bog and the Derrycreen Loughs, and the local name for it is simply the fort.

The Ordnance Survey mapped it in 1838 as a roughly circular enclosure somewhere between fifty and fifty-five metres across, which is a fairly typical size for a rath of its type. By the time the 1916 edition was produced, only the south-south-west to north-north-west arc was still legible enough to record. Today, the traceable outline has contracted further, to perhaps forty to forty-five metres in diameter. The sunken trackway outside the western scarp, about three metres wide and thirty centimetres deep, may preserve the course of the original fosse, the ditch that would once have run around the perimeter of the enclosure. What the sandpit left untouched in the south-east quadrant is occupied by a children's burial ground. These cillíní, as they are known in Irish tradition, were used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, and they are frequently found associated with ancient earthworks, whose pre-Christian associations made them acceptable sites for those outside the formal structures of the Church.

The convergence of a near-vanished early medieval enclosure and a children's burial ground in the same damaged corner of a Mayo field gives Brackloon a particular kind of layered weight. The archaeology is fragmentary and the history largely unrecorded, but the scarp, the hollow trackway, and the small grave-ground together preserve something that ordinary pasture has otherwise quietly swallowed.