In level pastureland near Blackgarden in County Galway, a cashel, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, once occupied a roughly circular footprint of around thirty metres in diameter. Today, there is nothing to see. No wall, no rubble line, no hollow in the turf. The site persists only on maps and in the archaeological record, a presence defined almost entirely by its absence.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, surveyed in the nineteenth century, recorded a roughly circular enclosure here, and that cartographic ghost is now one of the few pieces of evidence that anything ever stood on this spot. When McCaffrey catalogued the site in 1952, classifying it as a very ruinous circular stone fort, the structure was already far gone; the wall, such as it was, consisted of what he described as rocky debris. Cashels of this kind were typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and served as enclosed farmsteads for single family groups. Their walls, built from dry-stone masonry without mortar, were always vulnerable to robbing, collapse, and gradual absorption back into the landscape. By the time McCaffrey visited, Blackgarden's cashel had clearly been losing that slow battle for some time. At present, no visible surface trace survives at all.