On a gentle rise in the undulating pastureland of Carrowgarriff in County Galway, one such place was once recorded, and is now invisible. A cashel, the Irish term for a stone-walled ringfort, once occupied this spot, its circular drystone enclosure sitting on elevated ground in the way these early medieval farmsteads typically did, positioned to survey the surrounding land and signal the status of whoever lived within.

When the archaeologist McCaffrey documented the site in 1952, it was already in a damaged state. He classified it as a circular stone fort with a diameter of approximately 29.5 metres, noting that the drystone wall defining its perimeter was somewhat damaged on the western side. Cashels of this kind were generally built during the early medieval period, between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, functioning as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or extended household rather than military fortifications in any conventional sense. The drystone construction, that is, walling built without mortar, was a practical response to the abundance of stone across the Irish landscape, and hundreds of examples survive across Connacht in varying states of repair. This one does not. At some point after McCaffrey's visit, whatever remained of the wall was lost, absorbed back into the agricultural landscape around it.