The one at Gortaganny in County Galway offers considerably less. On a gentle rise in open grassland, what survives amounts to two earthen banks and the fosse between them, a fosse being the ditch dug to create the upcast material for the banks themselves, preserved only along an arc running from the north-west through north to north-east. South of that arc, the ground gives nothing away.

A ringfort, or rath, was a farmstead enclosure typical of early medieval Ireland, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, defined by one or more circular earthen banks that enclosed a domestic space for a family and their livestock. They are among the most common field monuments in the Irish landscape, with tens of thousands recorded across the country. This example at Gortaganny was originally about fifty metres in diameter, a modest but entirely standard size. At some point a field wall was constructed straight across the monument at both the north-west and north-east, cutting through the surviving earthworks and in all likelihood accelerating whatever gradual erosion or deliberate levelling removed the southern portion entirely. The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which recorded the Irish landscape in remarkable detail from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, still show it as a complete circular enclosure, meaning the loss visible today happened largely after that survey was made.

The arc of banks and fosse that does survive sits in grassland, and a visitor who knew exactly where to look might still trace the slight rise and fall of the ground across that northern curve. The field wall bisecting the site is in some ways as informative as the monument itself, a reminder of how ordinary agricultural improvement, rather than dramatic destruction, accounts for the disappearance of so many sites like this one.