At Lisheennanisk in the townland of Pollnamal, County Galway, there is nothing left to see, and yet the name alone is enough to tell archaeologists that something significant once stood here. The site is associated with an enclosure, and the fact that the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps record the name "Lisheennanisk" is, in itself, a kind of evidence. That name points to the former presence of a cashel, ringfort, or similar enclosure of the type archaeologists refer to as a CBG, a category covering the circular enclosed settlements that were the dominant form of rural habitation in early medieval Ireland. Today, no surface trace of the enclosure or any associated monument survives.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, produced in Ireland during the nineteenth century, were remarkable documents. Their surveyors recorded not just topography but place names, and those names have often outlasted the physical features they once described. "Lisheennanisk" follows a pattern familiar across Connacht, where lisheen, a diminutive of lios, meaning a fort or enclosure, appears in field and townland names long after the earthwork itself has been levelled by cultivation, drainage, or the slow attrition of centuries. The enclosure at this site carries the reference GA029-153 in the county's archaeological record, catalogued as part of the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, Vol. II, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling and published in 1999. That a monument can be identified primarily through its place name, with no corroborating physical remains, is a reminder of how much of the Irish archaeological landscape survives only in language.