At Cahermore in County Galway, what was once a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a stone enclosure wall rather than an earthen bank, survives now only on paper, having been mapped, overlaid, built upon, and finally erased from the ground entirely. The site is quietly instructive about how quickly early medieval landscapes can be consumed by the ordinary business of farming and construction.

Ordnance Survey maps from the period 1912 to 1916 recorded an irregularly shaped enclosure roughly 45 metres across on a northeast to southwest axis, its outline indicated by hachures, the fine hatched lines cartographers used to suggest relief and boundaries. Even at that stage, a field boundary already cut across it. By the 1933 edition of the six-inch OS map, the hachures had been reduced, appearing only along the western to northern arc, suggesting the earthwork was already being read as partial or degraded. When the site was physically inspected in October 1982, no visible surface trace remained at all. Aerial imagery from 2019 shows a house built along the northern edge of where the enclosure once stood, and a large outbuilding occupying what would have been its interior. The site has not been lost to neglect so much as absorbed, incrementally, into the working landscape around it.