That is, in a sense, precisely the point. Somewhere beneath the level grassland of this part of north Galway, the faint ghost of a circular enclosure lies hidden, its outline detectable only from the air, where differential crop growth traces the buried archaeology in a pattern invisible to anyone standing on the ground.

The enclosure came to light in July 1968, when aerial reconnaissance captured a cropmark revealing a roughly circular form somewhere between 30 and 50 metres in diameter. Cropmarks of this kind form when buried ditches or banks, long since levelled, retain or drain moisture differently from the surrounding soil, causing the vegetation above them to grow at a slightly different rate; in dry summers especially, these distinctions become legible from altitude even when the ground itself shows nothing. No surface trace of the enclosure survives today. What the original structure was used for is not recorded, though circular enclosures of this general type in Ireland range from prehistoric burial monuments to early medieval ringforts, the latter being the enclosed farmsteads that once dotted the Irish countryside in their thousands. What makes Moylough Beg quietly notable is that it does not stand alone: a comparable monument was recorded roughly 250 metres to the south-south-west, suggesting that this particular stretch of ground was once more densely occupied or organised than its present emptiness implies. The pairing was noted by Claffey in 1983, though the relationship between the two sites remains unexplained.