On the old Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, a small hillock in the pastureland of Leamcon, County Galway, is marked with the outline of an oval enclosure, roughly forty metres along its longer axis and twenty-five metres across. It has all the hallmarks of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland. These were typically circular or oval earthen banks enclosing a family farmstead, and thousands of them survive across the country in various states of preservation. This one, however, presents a different kind of problem.

When a survey team visited the site in October 1986, they found nothing. No bank, no ditch, no earthwork of any kind remained visible above ground. The hillock is still there, and the cartographic record is clear enough, but whatever once defined this enclosure had, by that point, been entirely levelled. Agricultural activity, drainage improvements, and the general pressure of working farmland have removed countless ringforts from the Irish landscape over the centuries, and this site in Leamcon appears to have been among them. What the maps preserve is essentially a ghost, the memory of a boundary that enclosed daily life perhaps twelve or thirteen centuries ago, now indistinguishable from the surrounding field.