At Balrath in County Westmeath, a low irregular ridge in the landscape is all that marks the site of a ringfort, the circular earthen enclosures, typically defined by a raised bank and ditch, that were once the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland. This one is gone. Not ruined, not overgrown, not quietly crumbling, but actively quarried away, leaving a slight undulation in the ground where a monument once stood clearly enough to be mapped.

The 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map records the enclosure as a distinct circular feature, annotated simply as "fort". That annotation places it within a long tradition of cartographic acknowledgement of such sites, many of which survived into the nineteenth century in reasonably legible form. The Balrath example sat on a low natural ridge, the kind of slightly elevated ground that early farmers often favoured for settlement. At some point after that first survey, the site was quarried into substantially, and by the time it was examined in recent years, no visible trace of the monument remained.