At Carrowmore in County Mayo, a cashel, which is a ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, sits on a slight rise in undulating pasture, its circular outline still just legible beneath the turf. When surveyed in 1989 by the Ballinrobe Archaeological Survey, the enclosure measured roughly 51.5 metres north to south and 48 metres east to west, its sod-covered stone wall standing around 1.1 metres high and 1.7 metres wide, with a gap of 1.6 metres in the east-south-east that likely marks an original entrance.

By the time an inspection was carried out in 2018, the picture had changed. The wall had been removed along the arc running from north-north-east to south-west, leaving only a faint grass-covered undulation to suggest where it once stood. The western half of the cashel fared better; here, a later field wall was built directly over the lower courses of the original structure, which had the inadvertent effect of preserving what lay beneath. It is a pattern familiar from the Irish landscape, where centuries of agricultural reuse quietly fossilise the remains of earlier activity even as they obscure it. Some 55 metres to the west, there is a possible associated house site, hinting that the cashel was once the focus of a small farmstead.

The eastern portion of the circuit is effectively gone at ground level, but walking the western arc, where the later field wall follows the ancient line almost exactly, gives a reasonable sense of the original scale. The slight elevation of the site, modest as it is, would have made the enclosure visible across the surrounding pasture, which is likely exactly the point.