This one in Kilcrimple, County Galway, offers nothing so obliging. The ringfort that once occupied a slight rise in the grassland east of Ballyturin Lough has been effectively swallowed by the land, leaving a place that exists more convincingly in maps and satellite imagery than it does underfoot.

Ringforts, roughly circular enclosures defined by an earthen bank and ditch, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, used variously as farmsteads, enclosures for livestock, or defended homesteads. This particular example, about thirty metres in diameter, was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1838, carefully noted as a circular enclosure on that rise above the lough. By the time anyone went to look for it on the ground in May 1986, no visible surface trace remained. The earthworks had been ploughed, levelled, or simply absorbed into the surrounding fields over the intervening century and a half. What the 1838 surveyors had captured in ink had, by the late twentieth century, ceased to exist in any form a visitor could perceive. Yet the site did not disappear entirely. Aerial imagery captured in 2019 shows its outline still faintly legible from above, a ghost crop-mark or soil discolouration tracing the old boundary in a way that ground level obscures completely.