In a field of pastureland at Knockaunnakirkeen in County Galway, there is a monument that had already begun to vanish before anyone could properly record it. When investigators first visited in May 1983, they found only the faintest traces of scarping, the slight reshaping of ground that typically signals the earthen bank of a rath, the Irish ringfort form built during the early medieval period as an enclosed farmstead. Alongside those traces was evidence of an associated souterrain, an underground passage or chamber commonly constructed beneath such enclosures, likely for storage or as a place of refuge. Together, these features were enough to suggest a possible rath, though even then the word "possible" was doing considerable work.

When the same site was revisited in 1985, just two years later, even those faint traces of scarping had disappeared entirely from the surface. Ploughing, livestock, drainage work, or the simple settling of disturbed soil can erase subtle earthworks with surprising speed, and whatever had remained of this enclosure had been absorbed back into the unremarkable surface of the pasture. What makes the site worth noting is precisely this quality of near-total erasure. The souterrain, recorded separately, still anchors the location in the archaeological record, but the rath itself exists now mainly as a category, a classified absence in a Galway field.