At Carrowbaun in County Galway, a circular earthen mound once sat in a field, roughly ten metres across, close enough to a cashel to suggest some functional or ceremonial relationship with it. A cashel, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a stone-walled enclosure, typically of early medieval date, used to protect a dwelling or small settlement. The mound nearby may have been a burial feature, a marker, or something whose purpose is now impossible to recover. What is certain is that it no longer exists in any form you could stand beside or photograph.

The mound appeared on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1933, which means it was still a recognisable feature of the landscape into the twentieth century. At some point after that survey was made, field clearance removed whatever earthwork had survived. The cashel it neighboured, recorded separately, lies some twenty metres to the north-east. Whether the two features were contemporary or simply accumulated in proximity over centuries is not known, but their closeness is the kind of detail that tends to interest archaeologists working through old maps and comparing what was recorded against what remains.