At Garraun in County Galway, a rath that was bulldozed during land-clearance operations in 1990 survives only as a ghostly outline visible on aerial photography, its circular form pressed into the earth like a memory the landscape refuses to release entirely.

The site sat on the crest of a ridge in undulating grassland, a position typical of raths, the earthen ringforts built throughout Ireland roughly between the early medieval period and the early Norman era, generally used as enclosed farmsteads. When archaeologists visited in 1982, the western half of the monument was still legible on the ground, defined by two concentric banks with a fosse, or ditch, running between them. The full diameter of the enclosure was recorded at 42.5 metres. Even then, a road cutting through from north-northwest to south-southeast had already divided and compromised the site. In the south-western quadrant of the interior, a souterrain was also recorded; souterrains are stone-lined underground passages or chambers associated with ringforts, most likely used for storage or as places of refuge. References to this site appear in publications by Holt in 1912, Westropp in 1919, and McCaffrey in 1952, suggesting it had been known to antiquarians for decades before it was lost. That it was demolished eight years after a formal survey visit, with no visible trace remaining at ground level, is a particularly blunt illustration of how quickly the physical record of early medieval Ireland can disappear.