At Farrangarode in County Mayo, a small circular enclosure once sat on a gentle rise in open pasture, and today there is nothing whatsoever to see. No earthwork, no trace of a bank, no depression in the ground. The place exists now only in cartographic memory and in the recollections of local people who knew it before the land was reclaimed.

The enclosure appears for the first time on the Ordnance Survey's 1930 edition map, recorded as a circular embanked area somewhere between fifteen and twenty metres in diameter. Such earthwork enclosures, broadly speaking, are a common feature of the Irish landscape and can date from the early medieval period onwards, sometimes enclosing a homestead, sometimes serving an agricultural or ritual function. What is notable here is that the 1837 OS six-inch map, the great baseline survey of nineteenth-century Ireland, shows no such feature at this location at all. Whether it was simply missed by the earlier surveyors, or whether it had already been partially obscured by that point, is not recorded. By the middle of the twentieth century, local information confirms it had been levelled entirely during land reclamation works, a fate that befell a great many earthworks across the country as agricultural improvement schemes reshaped the countryside.