At Aughnanure in County Galway, a ringfort once stood in a stretch of rough, scrub-covered ground, a circular enclosure roughly 30 metres across. Today, no visible trace of it survives at ground level. The only firm evidence for its existence is a mark on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the great nineteenth-century cartographic project that recorded Ireland's landscape in extraordinary detail before much of it changed or disappeared entirely.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths or lios, were enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They were built by farmers and minor lords who surrounded their homes and outbuildings with a circular earthen bank, sometimes accompanied by a ditch. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but many do not. Some were levelled by agriculture, some by development, and some, like this one, have simply been reclaimed by the landscape. The scrub and rough terrain at Aughnanure, which might seem to protect a site, has in this case preserved no discernible form at all.