On a west-facing slope in Ballymanagh, County Galway, where gently rolling pastureland runs down towards a stream, a mapped enclosure has effectively vanished. No earthwork, no bank, no hollow in the ground betrays where it once stood. The only evidence it existed at all comes from a cartographer's line drawn nearly two centuries ago.

The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded an oval enclosure on this hillside, measuring roughly six metres east to west and fifty-four metres from north-north-east to south-south-west. A roadway curved around it, running north-east to south-west, bending from east to south-west in a wide arc as if accommodating whatever lay inside. Enclosures of this kind in the Irish landscape are generally associated with early medieval settlement, the circular or oval ringfort being one of the most common forms of rural habitation in Ireland between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries, typically consisting of an earthen bank and ditch enclosing a farmstead. Whether this particular example was of that type, or something older or more functional, the notes do not say. By the time the six-inch map was revised in 1946, further field boundaries had been added to the area on paper. On the ground, however, even those are gone. The enclosure, the curving road, and the later divisions have all been absorbed back into the pasture.