In the townland of Creevagh Middle in County Mayo, a circular enclosure roughly forty metres in diameter was recorded on the first Ordnance Survey map of 1838, yet today the ground shows no visible trace of it at all. It has been levelled entirely, swallowed into partly cleared pasture, leaving a gap in the landscape where a defined boundary once stood.

Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish countryside. They are generally understood as enclosed farmsteads or settlement sites, often associated with the early medieval period, though without excavation a precise date for any individual example is difficult to establish. What the 1838 Ordnance Survey map captures, then, is the last known moment at which this particular enclosure was still legible on the surface. Sometime between that survey and the present, agricultural activity, land clearance, or gradual erosion erased whatever earthwork or stony boundary had defined it. The record in D. Lavelle's archaeological survey of Ballinrobe and district, published in 1994, confirms only what was already gone.