In level pastureland at Rathbaun in County Galway, a ringfort once stood, roughly 26 metres across, its circular form still legible enough in 1838 to be mapped by the Ordnance Survey. Today, no visible surface trace survives. The enclosure has simply dissolved back into the field around it.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch, occasionally with stone-facing on the inner or outer face of the bank. When McCaffrey surveyed this one in 1952, it was already in a bad way, described as an earthen fort that was "very ruinous", its defining raised area and scarp heavily obscured by overgrowth. The stone-facing that had once reinforced its structure was barely discernible. Whatever gradual processes of agriculture, vegetation, and time had been working on it before that point, they have since completed the job. Associated with the site is a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber typically cut into the earth or constructed from stone, often interpreted as a place of storage or refuge, and recorded separately under its own reference. Its presence suggests the rath was once a functioning settlement of some substance, even if the ground above now gives nothing away.