At Caherawoneen in County Galway, a cashel, that is, a stone-walled ringfort of the kind common across the west of Ireland during the early medieval period, was recorded on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a circular enclosure roughly 25 metres in diameter. Today, no visible surface trace survives. The site has been swallowed by dense overgrowth and outcropping limestone rock, the two forces that characterise so much of this corner of Connacht.

The 1838 OS mapping was part of a remarkably ambitious early nineteenth-century project to document Ireland at a scale and accuracy that had never before been attempted. Surveyors working across the country recorded field boundaries, buildings, and antiquities, capturing features that were already eroding or falling out of use. The cashel at Caherawoneen was one such feature, circular in plan and sufficiently distinct at the time of survey to be plotted clearly. That it has since disappeared from view entirely is not unusual for sites in areas of dense scrub and rock outcrops, where vegetation reclaims ground quickly and stone walls are gradually obscured or robbed for other uses. The name Caherawoneen itself contains the Irish word cathair, meaning a stone fort, which suggests the memory of the enclosure was woven into the place-name long before the mapmakers arrived.