Others have been so thoroughly erased that their existence survives only in the gap between what a map once recorded and what the ground now shows. The burial mound at Baskin Low in Co. Westmeath belongs to this second, quieter category, a place whose significance lies almost entirely in what is no longer there.

The revised edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map marked a small mound on a low rise amid gently undulating pasture, enough to suggest that someone, at some point, had identified something worth noting. By 1971, whatever physical presence the mound once had was gone. What remained was a circular discolouration in the vegetation, roughly 11.3 metres east to west and 9.8 metres north to south, visible only as a cropmark, the kind of subtle, light-coloured band that appears in aerial photographs when buried features alter the way grass or crops grow above them. The interior of the area carried a very slight slope facing east. Cropmarks like this are one of the principal ways archaeologists detect levelled monuments, since the fill of an ancient ditch or the disturbed soil of a demolished mound retains moisture differently from the surrounding ground, producing telltale variations in plant colour. Even that faint trace has since faded; aerial photography no longer picks up any sign of it. The site is now considered a possible location of a levelled burial mound, the designation resting on the earlier map evidence rather than on anything currently visible at ground level.

There is something particular about a site whose entire record amounts to a cartographic annotation, a single season's cropmark photographed in 1971, and a slope so gentle it barely registers. The landscape around Baskin Low carries no obvious indication that anything was ever here, which is itself a kind of information about how thoroughly the Irish countryside has been worked and reworked over the centuries.