In the gently undulating grassland of Killeroran in County Galway, a circular enclosure once sat in the landscape, roughly thirty metres across. It was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, that meticulous mid-nineteenth century effort to document Ireland field by field, and at that point it was still present enough to be drawn as a roughly circular form. Enclosures of this type are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish countryside, typically the remains of a ringfort, a raised or ditched boundary that once defined a farmstead or settlement, often dating to the early medieval period. This one, however, did not survive long enough to be studied in any detail.

By the time the third edition of the OS map was compiled in 1926, the site of the enclosure had been replaced by a quarry. The ground that had preserved whatever earthwork or feature lay beneath was removed for stone. The quarry itself did not last either; it was subsequently infilled and levelled, leaving the land as smooth and unremarkable as if neither the ancient enclosure nor the later excavation had ever existed. No visible surface trace survives. The site exists now almost entirely as a cartographic memory, a mark on an old map pointing to something that two successive interventions, one ancient, one industrial, have between them erased.