It appears on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1920, as a circular mound roughly ten metres in diameter. Today, nothing can be seen on the ground at all. No rise in the turf, no depression, no scatter of stone. The map records something; the field does not.

What the 1920 OS map was capturing is unclear, but circular mounds of this kind were often earthworks of early medieval or prehistoric origin, raised features in the landscape that could indicate anything from a burial cairn to a ringfort remnant or some form of enclosure. The six-inch Ordnance Survey maps, produced across Ireland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were meticulous enough to record features that local people still recognised but which have since been levelled by agriculture, drainage, or the slow passage of time. In this case, whatever remained visible to the surveyors of 1920 had already vanished by the time the site was formally assessed. The record in the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling and published in 1999, confirms as much, noting simply that no visible surface trace survives.

There is something quietly significant about a listed archaeological site that is, by its own official description, invisible. It survives only as a notation, a circle on an old map, a coordinate in a county inventory. The grassland at Bunatober holds no obvious reason to stop and look.