The operative word is "may". By the time anyone looked, there was nothing left to see.

The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks a subcircular enclosure at this spot, roughly 37 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west, and names it Rathcareen. The dimensions and form are consistent with a rath, though the map itself is the only real evidence for its existence. When the site was inspected in September 1982, no visible surface trace survived. The flat, low-lying ground in what is now the suburb of Renmore had given nothing away. Later mapping intended to record the monument's location placed it in the wrong spot entirely, compounding the uncertainty. Paul Gosling noted the discrepancy in 1993, but the site itself remained stubbornly absent.

What makes Rathcareen quietly interesting is precisely this quality of near-total erasure. The name persisted on a map for well over a century after the enclosure presumably disappeared, a label without a referent, pointing at something that had ceased to be legible in the ground. It is a reminder that the suburban surface of modern Galway, playing fields and all, sits over a landscape that has been continuously reshaped, and that the archaeological record is full of monuments known only because someone drew them before they vanished.