On a west-facing slope of a low hillock in the rolling grassland of Kiltullagh, County Galway, a ringfort once stood, its circular earthen bank enclosing a space of roughly twenty metres across. A rath, as such enclosures are commonly known, was typically a defended farmstead of the early medieval period, its raised bank and ditch marking the boundary of a family's home and livestock. Today, nothing of that boundary remains above ground. The only thing to mark the spot is an irregular mound of rubble, thick with nettles, the accumulated debris of generations of farmers clearing their fields and depositing the stone wherever it was least in the way.

What we know of the site's former existence comes from cartography rather than archaeology. The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most thorough surveys of the Irish landscape ever undertaken, recorded a circular enclosure at this location. That mapping effort captured countless features that have since vanished, and this Kiltullagh rath is one of them. At some point between the surveyor's visit and the present day, the earthworks were levelled entirely, most likely through agricultural improvement or repeated ploughing, leaving the field-clearance mound as the only incidental sign that something once occupied this particular rise in the ground.