At Joycegrove in County Galway, a ringfort, or rath, once occupied a rise in what is now open pastureland. A rath is a circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period, that would have enclosed a farmstead and offered its inhabitants a degree of defensive protection. This one measured roughly forty metres in diameter. Today, no visible surface trace of it survives.

What remains is its outline on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the large-scale surveys produced in Ireland from the 1830s onwards that captured the landscape with enough detail to record earthworks that subsequent centuries of farming have since erased. The land at Joycegrove was formerly demesne land, meaning it formed part of the managed estate grounds attached to a house of some significance, a category of ownership that often accelerated the levelling of older earthworks as land was landscaped, drained, or brought into agricultural use. The ringfort at Joycegrove appears to have been a casualty of exactly that process.