What the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map captured was a roughly circular earthwork, around twenty metres in diameter, sitting on a west-facing slope in woodland in County Galway. Not long after that survey was made, or perhaps around the same time, a road was driven through it on a northeast-to-southwest alignment, running about ten metres wide and consuming most of what had been there. The map preserves the ghost of something the landscape no longer does.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a familiar presence in the Irish countryside, most often the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1200 AD, though some examples are earlier or later. They were built in their thousands, and many have survived remarkably well. This one did not. The road that overlaid it was already present, or in the process of being built, when the first systematic mapping of Ireland was underway in the 1830s, which means the enclosure was likely obscured or destroyed within living memory of that survey. Today, only a curving bank survives to the southeast of the road, a single arc of raised ground that hints at what the full circuit might once have looked like.