In a field in Drumharsna, County Galway, there once stood a cashel, a type of stone ringfort defined by a roughly circular drystone enclosure wall, of the kind built across Ireland from the early medieval period onward. Today, no visible surface trace of it remains. The wall has collapsed so completely into the surrounding ground that the site exists now only in the archaeological record, a circle drawn in documentation rather than in stone.

When McCaffrey catalogued it in 1952, the cashel was recorded as having a diameter of approximately 36.6 metres, which would have made it a reasonably substantial enclosure. Cashels of this kind typically served as enclosed farmsteads, the stone wall providing security for a household and its livestock. The drystone construction technique requires no mortar, relying instead on the careful layering and interlocking of cut or gathered stone, which also means that, once neglected, such walls are easily robbed for building material elsewhere on a farm, or simply spread across the land over generations of ploughing. That appears to be exactly what happened here. The site sits within farmland, and the pressures of agricultural use over the centuries since its abandonment have done their work thoroughly.