This cashel near Barnaderg, in north County Galway, has been reduced to something considerably less: a single arc of collapsed drystone wall, running from the south-south-west to the north-west, roughly three and a half metres wide. That is all. The rest of the circuit, which once enclosed a space around fifty metres across, has left no visible trace on the surface.

A cashel is a ringfort built from stone rather than earth and bank, a form of enclosed settlement common across Ireland from the early medieval period. By 1932, when the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced, this one was already recorded only as a circular enclosure; even then it was a remnant. It sits about 300 metres south-west of Barnaderg Castle, a landmark that at least fixes its position in the landscape. What further complicates reading the site today is that a field boundary appears to radiate outward from the monument at the north-west, suggesting the old wall was absorbed into the working geometry of later agriculture, while another field wall cuts directly across it at the south-south-west. The enclosure, in other words, did not simply decay in place; it was gradually overwritten, its stones and lines repurposed by generations of farmers who may or may not have known what they were borrowing from.