On the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map of County Mayo, a circular enclosure roughly 35 to 40 metres in diameter is clearly marked on an east-west ridge above good grazing land near Dowagh. By the time the 1929 edition was drawn up, only the south-eastern arc of the feature was still indicated. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, typically interpreted as the remains of early medieval farmsteads, the word "ringfort" often used for them, though their dates and functions varied considerably. This particular one did not survive long enough for anyone to say with confidence what it had once been.

By 1994, the site had been formally recorded as levelled, with no visible surface trace remaining. Five years later, in 1999, four trial trenches were opened across the location ahead of the construction of a dwelling house. The excavation, carried out under licence 99E0699, found nothing of archaeological significance, no features, no artefacts. The ground offered no answer. A site that had been present enough to be mapped in the nineteenth century had, by the end of the twentieth, left not even a buried trace that the diggers could identify. The enclosure at Dowagh now lies within the bounds of a residential property, the ridge it once occupied occupied in an entirely different sense.