The word written there is 'Moteen', a diminutive form of the Irish 'mota', meaning a small mound or earthwork, and it implies that something once stood at this location in Ballinealoe worth recording. By the time anyone went looking for it on the ground, it was already gone.

When the site was visited in 1979, the field showed clear signs of recent bulldozing and a new roadway was being laid along the northern edge, running east to west. No surface trace of any antiquity remained. The earthwork had likely been levelled sometime in the preceding years, lost not to the slow erosion of centuries but to a few days of machinery work. Aerial photography taken in November 2011 confirmed that the area had also been partially quarried out, compounding the earlier disturbance. What the 1837 surveyors considered significant enough to name on their map exists now only as that name, floating beside a contour line with nothing beneath it to explain itself.

There is a particular kind of archaeological melancholy in a site like this one. The Ordnance Survey's early nineteenth-century mapping effort was meticulous about recording earthworks, raths, mounds, and other features that local people still recognised and named. 'Moteen' was presumably a feature the surveying teams could see and that locals had a word for. That word is now the sole surviving evidence that anything was ever there at all.