On the north-eastern face of an east-west ridge in Ballynaclonagh, County Westmeath, there is nothing left to see at ground level, and yet the outline of an entire enclosed settlement persists, readable only from the air. A ringfort, the most common early medieval monument type in Ireland, would originally have consisted of a roughly circular earthen bank and ditch enclosing a farmstead, sometimes with additional internal features. This one has been levelled entirely, its banks flattened and its ditches filled, leaving the surrounding landscape apparently unmarked.

The ringfort appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837, drawn as a circular enclosure sitting on the ridge with a quarry immediately to its north-east. That pairing is worth noting: the proximity of a quarry to an already-ancient monument suggests the two activities, extraction and levelling, may have fed one another over time, the earthworks gradually sacrificed to agricultural improvement or stone retrieval. What the Victorian surveyors recorded as a visible feature is now gone from the surface altogether. It reappeared, faintly, in a Digital Globe aerial photograph taken in November 2011, which shows a circular crop mark approximately forty metres in diameter from north to south. Crop marks form when buried features alter the moisture and nutrient content of the soil above them, causing overlying vegetation to grow at slightly different rates, differences that become visible from altitude, particularly in dry conditions. The ridge position, with views towards Lough Derravaragh to the north-east, is typical of ringfort placement, where elevation offered both practical oversight and a degree of natural defence.