Within the grounds of Ballybrit racecourse on the outskirts of Galway city, a short arc of raised ground, roughly five metres long and less than half a metre high, is all that remains of what was once a roughly semicircular enclosure. It sits in rough pastureland about twenty-five metres west of a nearby rath, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. The two monuments in proximity suggest this was once a more substantial settled landscape, though what exactly the enclosure was for remains unclear.

The enclosure was recorded on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1945 to 1946, which showed a bank running from the south-southwest through west to north, forming a broad curve. When the racecourse was widened in 1971, most of the monument was destroyed. An excavation carried out that same year by Waddell recovered only a single post-medieval pot sherd, nothing that could anchor the enclosure to a particular period or function. No fosse, meaning the ditch that typically accompanies an earthen bank of this kind, was found at any point. The excavator concluded that it was impossible to determine the enclosure's original plan, and that there was no evidence it had ever been anything other than a semicircle, perhaps always an incomplete or partial structure rather than a damaged one.

What remains today is protected under a preservation order, which accounts for why even this modest arc of bank survived the 1971 expansion at all. The irony is not small: a legally protected ancient monument, reduced to a low grassy curve in a corner of a racecourse, its origins and purpose unresolved, sitting a short distance from another earthwork that at least retains its shape. The single pot sherd and the ambiguous geometry are, in their own way, a fitting summary of what archaeology so often delivers, more questions than answers, and less to look at than the maps once suggested.