In scrubland roughly 150 metres north of the Craughwell River in County Galway, a ringfort once occupied a roughly circular patch of ground some 45 metres across. A ringfort, in the Irish context, is typically an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches surrounding a domestic interior. This one was real enough in 1838, when surveyors mapping the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded its outline clearly. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was gone.

When researcher E. McCaffrey visited the site in 1952 as part of a county-wide survey, his notes were blunt: 'Not present.' The enclosing element had already been compromised before that point, a field boundary running roughly north-northwest to south-southeast having clipped through its eastern edge at some stage. That kind of incremental agricultural reworking of the landscape, a ditch extended here, a bank levelled there, is one of the most common ways early medieval earthworks disappear. What the 1838 map preserves, then, is effectively a last sighting. No visible surface trace survives today, meaning the site exists now only in the cartographic record and in the negative space of what once stood there.