The ringfort at Pollataggle, in County Galway, offers something considerably more elusive: by the time anyone went to look at it properly, it had almost entirely ceased to exist. When inspectors visited the pastureland in October 1982, they found only very slight traces of a bank on the eastern slope of a spur of ground. The monument itself had effectively vanished.

What makes its former existence legible at all is the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which records its outline clearly enough to suggest a ringfort, most likely a rath. A rath is a type of circular earthwork enclosure, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, constructed during the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or high-status residence. The Pollataggle example appears to have measured roughly 25 metres in diameter, which places it at the smaller end of the rath scale. Between that first detailed mapping of the Irish countryside in the 1830s and the field inspection nearly a century and a half later, whatever earthworks once defined the site were levelled, most probably through generations of agricultural activity on the surrounding pasture. The spur of ground remains; the enclosure that once sat on it does not.