In Abbeyland Great, a townland in County Galway, a circular rath sat in gently undulating grassland until, by all appearances, it was levelled sometime after 1985. A rath is an early medieval earthwork enclosure, typically built to enclose a farmstead, and defined by one or more banks and ditches. This one measured roughly 39 metres in diameter, which is a fairly typical size, though by the time anyone examined it closely, it was already in a poor state.

When inspectors visited in February 1985, what remained was uneven and fragmentary. A bank survived along part of the circuit, but from the south to the south-west it had been buried or obscured beneath a later field wall, the kind of quiet overwriting that happened routinely as agricultural landscapes were reorganised over centuries. Elsewhere the enclosure was legible only as a scarp, a low slope in the ground where the original bank had spread or eroded. On the inner face of the surviving bank, traces of stone-facing were still just visible, a hint that the original construction had involved more than piled earth. Quarrying had eaten into the monument from two directions, from the north-east around to the east and again from the south-west to the north-west, leaving whatever remained pinched between two areas of disturbance. Satellite imagery reviewed after the inspection suggests the site has since been levelled entirely, leaving nothing visible above ground.