That absence is, in its own way, the story. A prehistoric barrow once sat on that low rise, a circular earthen mound roughly fourteen metres across and enclosed by a bank, the kind of burial or ceremonial monument that people raised across Ireland during the Bronze Age. By 2012, it was gone entirely, levelled during land reclamation works carried out at some point between 2005 and 2011.

The barrow had been documented with some care before its destruction. A survey of the Ballinrobe district carried out by Lavelle in 1994 described it sitting in pasture atop a knoll, a circular raised area approximately 13.8 metres north to south and 14 metres east to west, standing just 0.3 metres above the surrounding ground, enclosed by an earthen bank 0.6 metres high. A separate linear earthen bank extended from its western side. The monument also appeared on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1838 and 1929, meaning it had been a recognisable feature of the landscape for well over a century and a half before it was recorded in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. Aerial photographs confirmed it was still intact as recently as 2005. An inspection carried out in July 2012 found nothing upstanding. The bank to the west had been removed as well.

Barrows of this type, low earthen mounds sometimes covering ancient burials and sometimes serving other ritual purposes, are not uncommon in the Irish midlands and west, though many have been reduced by centuries of farming. What makes Rausakeera unusual is not the monument itself but the precision of its disappearance: a site mapped continuously for nearly two hundred years, noted by surveyors, measured, and photographed from the air, erased within a six-year window that nobody recorded at the time it happened.