On a ridge in the undulating grassland of Fahy in County Galway, there survives no visible trace whatsoever of what was once a circular enclosure roughly 26 metres across. No bank, no ditch, no hollow in the turf. Whatever was once here has been absorbed so thoroughly into the surrounding landscape that a person could walk directly over it without a flicker of suspicion.

When surveyors visited in September 1984, the site was already in a poor state. What they found was a scarp, the remnant of what had likely been the enclosing earthwork of a rath, the most common type of early medieval farmstead in Ireland, typically consisting of a raised circular area defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Even then, a later field wall had been built directly over part of the scarp, running from the south-west through to the north. That wall has since gone too. Aerial photography subsequently confirmed that it, along with several other walls in the area, had been removed. The location on a ridge crest, and the evidence of earlier maps, is now essentially all that supports the identification of this as a rath at all. The archaeology exists, at this point, more as an inference than as anything a spade or an eye could confirm.