This one makes its presence felt through complete absence. On the eastern slope of a low rise in County Galway, surrounded on three sides by bogland, there is nothing left to see of what was once known locally as Cloonagh Small Fort, a ringfort that has effectively erased itself from the landscape.

When a researcher named Neary recorded the site in 1914, it was already well on its way to disappearing. He described it as a much-ravelled circular earthen fort, meaning its defining features had been heavily disturbed, spread, or robbed over time. A ringfort, to put it plainly, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland primarily as a farmstead. What Neary had to work with at Cloonagh was only a small surviving arc of the original outline, comprising a scarp, a fosse (a defensive ditch), and an outer bank. From that fragment he calculated that the interior, or garth, would have measured around 120 feet across, equivalent to roughly 36.5 metres, which would have placed it at a fairly modest scale among comparable sites. By the time the site was formally assessed in the late twentieth century, even that partial arc was gone. No visible surface trace survives.