Others exist only as ink on an old map. At Baile Dóite in County Galway, a circular enclosure roughly twenty-five metres in diameter was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the landmark nineteenth-century mapping project that captured Ireland's landscape in extraordinary detail. Today, not a single visible trace of that enclosure remains above ground. What once stood in reclaimed pastureland, surrounded by scrub, has been entirely absorbed back into the field.

Circular enclosures of this kind are generally associated with the early medieval period in Ireland, though they could also reflect prehistoric or later activity. They typically consisted of an earthen bank and ditch enclosing a domestic or ritual space, the most common form being the ringfort, or ráth, which served as a farmstead and status marker for a family of some standing. At roughly twenty-five metres across, this would have been a modest example. Whatever its original function, the land reclamation that converted this part of west Galway into pasture has erased whatever earthwork survived into the modern period. Its presence is now known only because a surveyor, at some point in the mid-nineteenth century, thought it worth marking down.