On the northern slopes of a hill at Gorteenfadda in County Galway, the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records a circular enclosure roughly twenty-five metres across. No earthwork rises here now, no ditch or bank breaks the grass, and no visible surface trace of any kind survives. The place exists, in any meaningful sense, only in ink.

What the map once recorded was almost certainly a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a class of monument that dates broadly to the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. Ringforts were typically enclosed farmsteads, their circular banks and ditches defining a domestic space for a family and their livestock. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but many more have been lost to agricultural improvement, ploughing, and the gradual erasure of field boundaries. At Gorteenfadda, the enclosure was already being compromised when the surveyors passed through; the first edition map shows a field boundary cutting across it at both the east and west sides. Whatever remained above ground at that point has since vanished entirely into the surrounding grassland.