At Skealoghan in County Mayo, a circular enclosure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey map of 1838, traced onto paper by surveyors who could still see something worth noting. At some point after that, it disappeared entirely. Today the ground holds no visible surface traces, nothing to catch the eye or prompt a question from a passing walker.

Circular enclosures of this kind are common enough across the Irish landscape to suggest a long tradition of enclosed settlement and land use stretching back through the early medieval period and beyond. They could serve as farmsteads, as boundaries for livestock, or as enclosures with ceremonial significance, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say which. What makes the Skealoghan example quietly melancholy is that the 1838 mapping represents its only surviving record. By the time a local archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe district, including the areas around Lough Mask and Lough Carra, was compiled in 1994, the site was already described as levelled, reduced to a cartographic memory rather than anything you could stand beside and read in the soil.