On a south-east-facing slope of a low hillock above open bogland in County Galway, a ringfort once stood, a roughly circular earthwork enclosure of the kind that Irish farming families built and lived within throughout the early medieval period, probably between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Today, only a faint rise in the ground hints that anything was ever there.

The enclosure was recorded on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it appears as a circular form with a diameter of approximately thirty metres. By the time the OS revised its mapping in 1944 to 1945, something had already begun to erase it: a field boundary running roughly north-west to south-east had been drawn across the north-east side of the site, clipping the edge of the old enclosure. That boundary did not appear by accident. At some point in the century between those two surveys, whoever worked this land had extended or reorganised a field system without, perhaps, giving much thought to what lay beneath the bank they were encroaching on. The result is a site that has been quietly absorbed into the agricultural landscape until almost nothing distinguishable remains.

A rath, to use the Irish term, was typically a single-family farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Thousands were built across Ireland, and thousands have been lost in exactly this way, not dramatically demolished but gradually worn down, ploughed across, or divided by later field walls until only a slight unevenness in the ground survives to mark where people once lived. At Kilquain, even that faint rise is easy to miss.