Local people, however, knew it as something else entirely: a fort. That quiet disagreement between cartographic scepticism and oral tradition sits at the heart of what makes this small earthwork worth a second look.

When archaeologists from the Galway Archaeological Survey came to inspect the site in July 1982, they found a very low, grass-covered semicircular bank of earth and stone running from the north-east to the south-west, with an internal diameter of twelve metres. The bank itself was modest, just 1.6 metres wide at the top and 4.2 metres at the base, rising only about 35 centimetres on the interior side and a mere 15 centimetres on the exterior. A rath, as this type of monument is sometimes called, is a ringfort: a roughly circular enclosure typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, most commonly built during the early medieval period in Ireland and used as a farmstead or place of settlement. This one, if that is what it is, has been worn down to almost nothing. Crucially, it had not been bulldozed or deliberately levelled. Local accounts suggested it had never stood any higher than what surveyors found in 1982, and that stones had simply been thrown into the interior over time, where a number of grass-covered boulders remained visible. Adding to the slight strangeness of the place, the outer ground level was actually higher than the interior, an inversion of the usual topographic logic you would expect at such a site. The gentle north-east-facing slope in which it sits, now ordinary grassland, offers little in the way of drama, which may be precisely why the monument escaped notice for so long, catalogued as a pit rather than a place people once chose to define and enclose.