At Lissyconor in County Galway, a ringfort of roughly forty metres in diameter once occupied a patch of grassland set between stretches of bogland to the east and west. Today, almost nothing of it can be seen. The earthwork that once defined it has been reduced to a faint vegetation band along its eastern and southern edges, the kind of subtle discolouration that rewards a careful eye but would be easy to walk past entirely.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths or liosanna, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. The "lios" element in the townland name Lissyconor is itself a linguistic trace of one such enclosure. When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in the nineteenth century, the ringfort at Lissyconor was still legible enough to be recorded as a roughly circular enclosure. That same survey captured another detail of interest: the townland boundary loops around the western side of the fort, a common phenomenon in Irish landscapes where administrative boundaries were drawn to respect, or simply to follow, existing ancient features. The boundary survived in the cartographic record long after the earthwork itself had all but vanished into the grass.