At Cloghroak in County Galway, a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort of early medieval origin, once enclosed a roughly circular area of around 34 metres in diameter. Today, there is nothing to see. The rough pastureland that surrounds the site gives no indication that anything was ever there.

The site was recorded by McCaffrey in 1952, catalogued as a circular stone fort in a very ruinous condition, and assigned the reference number 140a in that survey. By the time of more recent documentation, even that ruinous condition had resolved itself into something simpler: no visible surface trace whatsoever. The cashel has not merely decayed; it has been absorbed entirely back into the landscape, whether through agricultural clearance, stone robbing over the centuries, or the slow persistence of grass and soil over collapsed walls. Cashels of this kind were a common feature of early medieval Ireland, serving as enclosed farmsteads or residences for people of some local standing, their stone walls distinguishing them from the more numerous earthen ringforts known as raths. At roughly 34 metres across, this one would have been a modest but functional example of the type.