The ringfort at Carrowmoneen, County Galway, survives today only as a cartographic ghost, its roughly circular outline, approximately thirty metres across, captured on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map published in 1930 and nowhere else. No bank, no ditch, no earthwork of any kind remains visible at ground level.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when formed from earthen banks rather than stone, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its outbuildings within one or more circular ramparts. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation; many thousands more have been levelled by agriculture, development, or simple neglect over the centuries. The one at Carrowmoneen belongs firmly to this second, less visible category. By the time it was formally recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Galway Vol. II, compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra, and Paul Gosling and published in 1999, the site had already been built over entirely. What the map recorded in 1930 as a recognisable enclosure in grassland had, by the close of the twentieth century, disappeared beneath a domestic house.