Somewhere in a ploughed-out field in County Westmeath, a prehistoric burial monument was erased from the landscape sometime before 1987. When a fieldworker visited that year, it was already gone. By 2013, a survey team found no trace whatsoever. The only reason we know it existed at all is that someone had the presence of mind to record it carefully, twice, in 1979 and 1980.

What those earlier surveys captured was a ring-barrow, a form of funerary monument consisting of a roughly circular enclosure defined not by a raised central mound but by a surrounding fosse (a shallow ditch) and a low outer bank, with a level, featureless interior. This particular example was modest in scale, measuring roughly 11.1 metres north to south and 11.3 metres east to west, crest to crest of the bank. It sat on rising ground with open views to the north and west, and old cultivation ridges running east to west through the field to its south stopped neatly at the bank's edge, suggesting that whoever farmed this land in earlier centuries still recognised the monument as something to be respected. By the late twentieth century, that instinct had gone. The plough that destroyed it was thorough. What David McGuinness documented in 2014, drawing on those earlier records, is essentially a monument known only on paper. The surrounding area is still thick with archaeology: a ringfort at Kilpatrick Fort lay less than 600 metres to the south-south-east, St. Patrick's Well is about a kilometre to the south, and the site of Simonstown Castle is within 500 metres. A place called Killahugh appears on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map between the barrow and the castle, though no ancient church has ever been formally documented there, leaving that name as its own small puzzle.