At Rathgortnamona, on a south-facing slope in the undulating pastureland of Rinville in County Galway, there is nothing to see. The ground gives nothing away. No earthwork, no hollow, no raised ridge suggests that anything was ever here at all.

The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map tells a different story. It records a subcircular enclosure at this spot, roughly 32 metres east to west and 25 metres north to south, a rath or ringfort of the kind, a roughly circular earthen enclosure typically associated with early medieval settlement and farmsteads, that once dotted the Irish countryside in considerable numbers. By the time Lynch Athy wrote about it in 1914, citing page 137 of his account, the monument had already been gone for decades, described as having been levelled to the foundations since 1840. McCaffrey, writing in 1952, confirmed what any visitor would still find today: no visible surface trace survives. The enclosure was erased somewhere in the years between the surveyors recording it and the middle of the nineteenth century, lost to agricultural improvement or simple clearing of the land, a fate shared by a great many such sites across the country during that period.