In the undulating farmland of Crossconnell More in County Galway, a ringfort, the type of roughly circular earthen or stone enclosure typically used as a defended farmstead in early medieval Ireland, has been so thoroughly absorbed into the agricultural landscape that only a low mound remains, and even that reads to the casual eye as nothing more than a natural rise in the field.

Ordnance Survey records tell a clearer story. The site is named simply 'Fort' on the OS Fair Plans and appears on the six-inch maps as a roughly circular enclosure approximately forty metres in diameter. By the time anyone thought to look more closely, a number of field boundaries had already cut across it, parcelling the monument into fragments and accelerating whatever processes of erasion were already under way. What survives is a mound that gives little outward indication of its origins, sitting quietly in farmland that has long since reorganised itself around and through the site.