Somewhere in the grassland of north County Galway, a roughly circular cashel, a type of early medieval stone enclosure built from drystone walling rather than earthen banks, describes an arc across the ground. Its diameter is around 35 metres, but the wall that once defined it has long since collapsed, and the legible portion runs only from the north-east through the east and around to the south-west. Beyond that arc, nothing visible remains at the surface.

The site is made stranger still by the way a townland boundary bisects it, cutting across the monument at both the north-east and south-west. That administrative line, drawn at some point in the post-medieval carving-up of the landscape, has effectively severed the cashel from any surviving trace of its north-western arc. Whether the wall there was robbed for field boundaries, simply absorbed into the land, or was already gone before the boundary was fixed is impossible to say from what remains on the surface. About 270 metres to the south-east, a separate ringfort sits in the same landscape, suggesting this part of Galway once held a modest density of enclosed settlement, the kind of early Christian period farmsteads that are scattered across Ireland but rarely survive with any prominence.