In the low-lying flat farmland around Killinny in County Galway, there was once a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a stone enclosure wall rather than an earthen bank. At its most visible, it measured roughly forty metres in diameter, substantial enough to have sheltered a farming household and their animals during the early medieval period, when such enclosures were the dominant form of rural settlement across Ireland.

The site's story can be traced, in diminishing returns, through two editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. The 1838 edition records a complete circular enclosure, clear enough in outline to be faithfully plotted. By the 1922 edition, only the south-eastern sector remained legible on the ground. When the site was visited in September 1982, no visible surface trace could be found at all. The progression is a familiar one for low-lying ground subjected to generations of agricultural improvement; ploughing, drainage, and land consolidation can reduce a stone-walled enclosure to nothing within a century or two, leaving the cartographic record as the only surviving evidence that something was ever there.