In a field at Parsonstown in County Westmeath, there was once a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period and associated with a single farmstead or a small settlement of higher status. Raths were built in their thousands across Ireland, defined by one or more banks of raised earth, sometimes accompanied by a ditch, enclosing a central area where people lived, kept animals, and stored goods. This one measured approximately 27 metres in diameter, placing it at the modest end of the scale.

Its existence is known primarily from the Ordnance Survey Ireland 25-inch map series, the large-scale mapping undertaken in the late nineteenth century that captured field boundaries, earthworks, and other landscape features in considerable detail. At that point, the circular bank was clearly enough defined to be recorded. By the time satellite imagery was captured between 2011 and 2013, no surface trace of the earthwork remained visible. The enclosure had been levelled, most likely through agricultural activity over the intervening decades, a process that has claimed a significant proportion of Ireland's ringfort heritage. What persists now is essentially a shadow: a faint circular cropmark or soil difference that aerial and satellite imaging occasionally reveals, the ghost of a bank that once stood in grassland.