On the upland bog where four townlands meet in Kilbeg, County Galway, there is nothing left to see of the structure that once stood here, yet the Ordnance Survey cartographers of the nineteenth century recorded it carefully enough on their six-inch maps: Cashlaundrumlahan. The name itself carries the trace of a cashel, the Irish word for a stone ringfort, a type of enclosure typically formed by one or more circular dry-stone walls used to protect a farmstead or territory in early medieval Ireland. The second element, drumlahan, suggests a long ridge, which fits the upland character of the site. A place worth naming, then, and worth remembering, even after the thing itself had gone.

Local tradition described the remains as a double wall, meaning the cashel may once have had concentric rings of stonework, a feature found at some of the more substantial examples of the type. That structure was destroyed when the surrounding land was forested, a fate that claimed many such monuments across Ireland during the large-scale afforestation programmes of the twentieth century. No visible surface trace survives today. What does remain, intriguingly, is a curving trackway in the area, one that may follow the original circuit of the monument without anyone necessarily intending it to. The land, in other words, has retained a memory of the shape even after the stones themselves were cleared away.