The site at Mullaghawny is, in the most literal sense, an absence, and that is precisely what makes it worth knowing about.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838 recorded a circular embanked enclosure here, roughly 25 to 30 metres in diameter. This was almost certainly a rath, the term used for a ringfort, a class of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches and associated with the farming families who built them from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. By the time the revised edition of the map appeared in 1922, the confident circle had softened into a mere arc of hachuring, the cartographer's way of suggesting a slope or earthwork that was already losing definition. Sometime after that, the enclosure was levelled entirely. A stream or drain runs at the base of the slope about 65 metres to the east, and Ballymore Lough lies not much further beyond it; the rath's position on raised ground above water and wetland would have been a considered choice by whoever built it.

There is nothing to see at ground level now. The pasture has closed over whatever earthwork survived into the twentieth century. What remains is the map evidence, the landscape logic of the rise, and the knowledge that a family once enclosed their world in a ring on this particular hill in Mayo.