In a pasture on a rise near Aghamore in County Mayo, there was once a small circular enclosure that has since been so thoroughly levelled that nothing remains visible at ground level. The land simply looks like a field.

A rath is an early medieval earthwork enclosure, typically circular or near-circular, formed from a raised bank of earth and sometimes surrounded by a fosse, an external ditch cut into the ground. These were domestic settlements, farmsteads of the early Irish period, and thousands of them survive across the country in varying states of repair. This particular example was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1838 and 1919, and by the time of that second edition it was described as a subcircular embanked enclosure somewhere between twenty-five and thirty metres in diameter, with an external fosse and a section of its bank absorbed into a field boundary running from the northwest to the northeast. That incorporation into a later fence line is telling; it is often how earthworks begin to disappear, their materials quietly repurposed by generations of farmers tidying land into more useful shapes. At some point between the mapping and the present, the remainder was levelled entirely.