At Lisnaraha in Grange, County Galway, a subcircular enclosure measuring roughly 35 metres north-east to south-west and 32 metres north-west to south-east was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the meticulous nineteenth-century cartographic project that captured the Irish landscape in extraordinary detail. Today, standing in the surrounding pastureland, there is nothing to mark the spot. No earthwork, no stony outline, no depression in the grass. The place exists now almost entirely as an idea, preserved in old paper and in its own name.

The name Lisnaraha is itself a clue. The element "lis" derives from the Irish lios, a common prefix attached to ringforts, the circular enclosed farmsteads that were built and occupied across Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The cartographic evidence and the placename together suggest this was a ringfort, and possibly a cashel, meaning a ringfort defined by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank. Stone cashels, when robbed out over centuries for field walls and building material, can vanish almost completely from the surface. A second possible cashel was recorded approximately 310 metres to the north-north-east, which raises the intriguing possibility that this small area of east Galway once held a cluster of enclosed settlements, each farmstead within sight or signalling distance of its neighbour, now both of them equally invisible to the casual eye.