In November 1984, the rath at Weston in County Galway was still a legible thing: a circular earthen bank roughly 42 metres across, its inner face partly lined with stone that survived to a metre in height along the northern and north-eastern arc. A band of nettles three to four metres wide curving around the southern side hinted at an external fosse, the ditch that would originally have run around the outside of the bank, adding both defensive depth and social meaning to the enclosure. Raths, the earthwork ringforts that once numbered in their tens of thousands across Ireland, were the farmsteads and homesteads of early medieval life, typically dating from somewhere between the sixth and twelfth centuries. This one, sitting in level grassland, was in fair condition.

By November 2001, it was gone. A re-inspection found the bank levelled, the stone-facing presumably dispersed, and the interior given over to agricultural infrastructure: a concrete silage platform cut into the south-western quadrant, a slatted shed built just beyond it. The only trace of what had been there was a band of lighter-coloured grass, two and a half to three metres wide, tracing a partial arc from west to south where the bank had compressed the soil beneath it for centuries. That pale curve in the turf is, in its way, a more affecting detail than the structure it replaced, being the kind of evidence that takes a long time to disappear and speaks quietly about what was removed.