At Carraghy in County Galway, a ringfort once stood in the landscape, circular and roughly thirty metres across, its earthen bank enclosing whatever domestic life played out within. Today, no visible surface trace survives. The site is, in the most literal sense, gone from the ground, present only in the cartographic memory of the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where a surveyor's hand recorded its outline sometime in the nineteenth century.

Ringforts, also known as raths or, in the Connacht tradition, cashels when built of stone rather than earth, were the dominant settlement form of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. They served as enclosed farmsteads, the circular bank or wall providing both a degree of security and a clear boundary around the household and its livestock. This particular example at Carraghy sat approximately forty metres north of a second enclosure, the two sites forming a close pairing that was not unusual; related homesteads or successive phases of settlement sometimes clustered in this way. That both survive only as records rather than as earthworks is a reminder of how thoroughly centuries of ploughing, drainage, and land improvement have rearranged the surface of the Irish countryside.