In the level pasture of Ballinteeaun, in County Mayo, there is nothing to see at all, and that in itself is the point. What once stood here, a small circular enclosure of the kind that dots the Irish landscape in various states of survival, has vanished so completely that the ground gives nothing away. No earthwork, no raised ring, no scatter of stone. Just grass.

The only firm record of its existence comes from the Ordnance Survey map of 1838, which marks a small circular enclosure on this spot. Circular enclosures of this type are generally understood to be the remains of early medieval farmsteads, known as raths or ringforts, where an earthen bank and ditch once defined a domestic space, protecting livestock and household alike. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying degrees of preservation; many others have been levelled by centuries of agriculture. At Ballinteeaun, whatever form the enclosure took, it had already been reduced to a cartographic notation by the time the first Ordnance Survey teams moved through Connacht in the 1830s, and today even that faint imprint on the land is gone.