At Gortnagoyne in County Galway, a ringfort that once stood on a glacial ridge above the surrounding grassland has been completely consumed by quarrying, leaving no visible surface trace whatsoever. A ringfort is typically a circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank or stone wall, used as a farmstead or defensible homestead during the early medieval period. Here, nothing of that structure remains to be seen.

The 1932 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map still recorded its presence, marking it as an arc of hachures, the fine lines cartographers used to suggest raised ground or earthworks, curving from north to southeast along the ridge. That cartographic ghost is now among the only evidence that anything was ever there. Local tradition had already identified the site as the location of a fort, the kind of oral memory that often proves reliable in Irish townlands, passed down through generations who would have known the earthwork as a familiar feature of the landscape. At some point after that map was drawn, large-scale quarrying removed both the ridge and whatever archaeological material it contained.