At Lehinch in County Galway, a ringfort once sat on a south-facing slope above a turlough, one of those seasonally flooding limestone lakes peculiar to the west of Ireland, which fill in winter and shrink back to grassland in summer. The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps as a circular enclosure roughly fifty metres in diameter, a scale consistent with the raths that served as enclosed farmsteads across early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches surrounding a central living area. Nothing of it remains above ground today.

In 1974, the enclosure was levelled to make way for a house. The act itself was not unusual for the period; many ringforts across Ireland were removed during the twentieth century as land was cleared for agriculture, construction, or drainage. What the Lehinch site had going for it, before it disappeared, was a setting that would have made considerable sense to whoever built it. A south-facing slope offers warmth and shelter; proximity to a turlough provided seasonal water and grazing. The location suggests a deliberate and practical choice by an early medieval farming community, even if nothing about that community can now be recovered from the surface of the land.