South of Ross Lake in County Galway, on undulating ground from which pasture has been recently cleared, there once stood a circular enclosure roughly 48 metres in diameter. It appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, dutifully recorded by nineteenth-century surveyors who walked this landscape and noted what they found. Today, no visible surface trace survives. The enclosure exists now only as a mark on an old map and a coordinate in an inventory.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a recurring feature of the Irish countryside, ranging from prehistoric ringforts, which were typically earthen or stone-banked enclosures used as defended farmsteads, to later ecclesiastical enclosures surrounding early Christian sites. Without excavation it is rarely possible to say which type a particular example represents, or when it was built and abandoned. What is clear here is that the land has been worked hard enough, and long enough, to erase whatever earthworks once defined the site. The first edition OS six-inch maps, surveyed in the 1830s, captured a snapshot of the Irish landscape at a moment before intensive agricultural improvement and land clearance had done their most thorough work, and it is largely thanks to those surveyors that sites like this one are recorded at all.