In a field of average pasture near Mullafarry in County Mayo, on a slight rise that commands open views to the north and north-east, there is a place where the ground swells almost imperceptibly, measuring somewhere between twelve and fourteen metres across. That gentle undulation is, in all likelihood, the last trace of a small mound once described by locals as roughly circular, about five feet high, with a narrow top. The mound itself is gone. What lingers is the faintest suggestion that something was once there.

The feature appears on the 1929 edition of the Ordnance Survey map as a semi-circular area, roughly twenty-five metres north to south and fifteen metres east to west, its straight edge running along a north-south field boundary to the west. The cartographers used hachuring, a technique of short directional lines used to indicate relief, in a way that suggests a sunken interior, which would be consistent with a ringfort or enclosed settlement site. An enclosure of this type, a roughly circular area bounded by a bank or wall, was a common form of early medieval farmstead across Ireland. Yet the feature does not appear at all on the earlier 1838 six-inch Ordnance Survey map, which raises its own quiet questions about when it was recorded, when it disappeared, and what exactly it was. No structural remains now correspond to what the 1929 map depicts. Local memory, at least as it was gathered, recalled the mound clearly enough, but the ground has since been altered, and a farm track now runs along the western edge of the location, where the old field boundary once marked the straight side of the semi-circle.