On a rocky knoll close to the shore of Cuan Chasla, the inlet on the south Connemara coast, a circular enclosure once occupied a modest prominence above the water. It measured roughly 25 metres in diameter, and beyond that, very little can be said with certainty. No earthwork, no wall line, no depression in the ground remains to indicate it was ever there.

The enclosure appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the great mid-nineteenth-century survey that recorded the Irish landscape in extraordinary detail, including features that were already ancient or fading at the time of its making. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, typically interpreted as the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval farmers, though some may be considerably older. They are sometimes called raths or ringforts, defined by an earthen bank or a low stone wall encircling a domestic or agricultural space. At Cladhnach, the record of one having existed is preserved only in that cartographic snapshot. By the time anyone thought to look more carefully at the ground, the surface trace had gone entirely.