At An Pollach Riabhach in County Galway, a ringfort once sat in level grassland, a circular enclosure roughly forty metres across. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths or lios, were the farmstead enclosures of early medieval Ireland, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and they survive in their thousands across the country. This one does not. Nothing remains above the surface, and no trace of it is visible underfoot.

The enclosure was recorded on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which means that surveyors working in the early nineteenth century could still see it clearly enough to mark it as a distinct circular feature. By that point, field boundaries had already begun to encroach on it from the south-east and south-west, eating into its edges. When McCaffrey surveyed the area in 1952, he found it completely effaced. Whatever earthworks had defined it had been levelled, most likely through agricultural improvement and the gradual assertion of those same field boundaries over the intervening century or more.