At Boyhill in County Galway, a domestic dwelling now occupies ground where an ancient ringfort once sat in gently rolling pastureland, its earthworks erased so completely that no visible surface trace survives. The site is, in one sense, unremarkable on approach; in another, it is a small case study in how quickly the physical record of early medieval Ireland can disappear.

A ringfort, or rath, was a roughly circular enclosed settlement, typically defined by one or more earthen banks with a ditch, called a fosse, between them, and used as a farmstead during the early medieval period. The Boyhill example was no exception to this general pattern. Ordnance Survey six-inch maps recorded it as a subcircular enclosure measuring approximately 46 metres northwest to southeast and 35 metres northeast to southwest, already partly bisected by a road cutting across its northeastern to southeastern arc. A plan published by Knox in 1918 indicated that it retained two banks and an intervening fosse at that time, suggesting it was reasonably intact well into the twentieth century. Sometime between 1970 and 1978, according to Cody's 1989 survey, the earthworks were levelled. A house was subsequently built on the site.