In the pastureland around Monksfield in County Galway, a ringfort once stood that has now been so thoroughly absorbed into the working landscape that no visible trace of it remains at the surface. Ringforts, sometimes called raths, are among the most common early medieval monuments in Ireland, typically circular enclosures defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, thought to have served as defended farmsteads. This one, however, has been reduced to an absence.

When McCaffrey catalogued it in 1952, classifying it as an earthen fort, the situation was already bleak. At that point the fort had been almost completely levelled by cultivation, and all that remained was a slight mound roughly 36.5 metres in diameter. That faint swelling in the ground has since gone too, leaving nothing for the eye to catch. The original bank and ditch that would have defined the enclosure, the interior platform where a household once stood, the whole spatial logic of the place, have been steadily ploughed away over the decades between McCaffrey's visit and the present.