At Drumkeary in County Galway, a rath once occupied a north-facing slope in what is now ordinary pastureland. A rath, or ringfort, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period as a farmstead and enclosure for livestock. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one does not survive at all, at least not in any form a visitor could observe.

What is known comes from the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the large-scale surveys carried out in Ireland during the nineteenth century that recorded landscape features then still visible on the ground. Those maps show a circular enclosure approximately 42 metres in diameter at Drumkeary. By the time archaeologists examined the site in more recent decades, the enclosure had been clipped and overlain by a number of field boundaries, the gradual work of land division and agricultural improvement that has erased so many similar monuments across the country. No visible surface trace now survives.

The site is worth noting precisely because of this absence. The OS maps captured something that the landscape itself no longer shows, making the cartographic record the only remaining evidence that a settlement of some kind once organised this particular slope. The people who lived within that 42-metre circle, who kept animals and worked the surrounding land during the early medieval centuries, left no mark that can now be seen standing in the field above Drumkeary.