In low-lying pasture near the confluence of the Black River and the Srafaungal River in Co. Mayo, a circular earthwork once rose gently from reclaimed bogland. By the time anyone thought to look closely, it was gone, replaced first by a pasture field and eventually by a house. What makes the site quietly unusual is not what survives but the paper trail of its disappearance, a sequence of maps and notes that shows how an ancient feature was gradually misread, dismissed, and erased.

The earthwork does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 to 1838, but by the time the more detailed 25-inch plan was produced, it was clearly visible: a small central rise encircled by a double ring of hachuring, giving an overall diameter of around 20 metres. That pattern is consistent with a ringbarrow, a type of low burial mound defined by one or more surrounding banks or ditches, typically associated with the Bronze Age. The 1922 OS six-inch map repeated the same depiction. When Office of Public Works field investigators visited in 1958, however, they recorded it simply as an old house or byre, partly stone and partly turf, with a collapsed bank around it. On that basis it was deemed to have no archaeological interest, and the landowner was given permission to reclaim the land. Local memory, though, told a different story: people recalled a circular bank enclosing a central domed rise some five to seven metres across, a description that matches the cartographic evidence rather well. By 1995 there was nothing left to see.