At Ballynacloghy in County Galway, a cashel, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, once occupied a north-facing slope in undulating grassland. Today, no visible surface trace of it survives at all. It is, in the strictest sense, a place that can only be visited in the imagination.

When the archaeologist McCaffrey catalogued the site in 1952, he described it as an oval stone fort measuring roughly 62 metres north to south and 53.4 metres east to west, which would have made it a substantial enclosure. Even then, he classified it as "extremely ruinous" and noted that it was obscured by field debris. Cashels of this kind were typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland, functioning as enclosed farmsteads for a family and their livestock, their thick dry-stone walls serving both as a boundary and a degree of defence. Whatever walls once stood at Ballynacloghy had already been reduced, by the mid-twentieth century, to little more than a scatter of stone beneath the grass. In the decades since, even that has disappeared from view.