Others have been so thoroughly absorbed back into the land that only the most oblique angle of light, or the lens of a satellite camera, gives them away. The ringfort at Chanonstown in County Westmeath belongs to this second, quieter category. To walk the gently rolling pasture where it once stood is to see nothing out of the ordinary at all. Yet aerial photography reveals a ghostly partial cropmark tracing an oval arc from west through north to south, the soil above the old ditches still betraying, season by season, what was once there.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths or lios, were enclosed farmsteads typically built between the early medieval period and around the twelfth century, their circular or oval banks and ditches defining a family's living space and protecting livestock. The Chanonstown example was recorded on the revised 1913 edition of the Ordnance Survey twenty-five inch map as an oval earthwork measuring roughly 36 metres northwest to southeast and 31 metres northeast to southwest, a modest but not untypical footprint for such a structure. By 2005 the monument had been levelled, its banks and ditches flattened into the surrounding farmland. A linear field boundary now cuts across the southwestern sector, running northwest to southeast, transecting whatever remained of the original circuit. The cropmark visible in aerial imagery is partial as a result, the southwestern quadrant interrupted by this later division of the land, the rest surviving only as a faint differential in how the grass and crops grow above disturbed ground.