Nothing marks it now. No earthwork, no ditch, no raised bank. The field looks like any other field.

What the maps recorded was a cashel, a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earth and timber, typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth century. Cashels and ringforts were the farmsteads of their age, enclosing a household and its immediate outbuildings within a defensive perimeter. They were built in their tens of thousands across Ireland, and a great many have since been levelled by centuries of agriculture. This one at Clooneen sits on a slight rise in the land, a detail that would once have made practical sense for drainage and visibility, though that advantage is now entirely invisible to the eye. The OS six-inch maps, surveyed in the nineteenth century, caught it at a moment when some trace was still legible in the landscape. By the time it was formally recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling and published in 1999, no visible surface trace survived at all.