In the undulating grassland of Rahard in County Galway, there sits a ringfort that, by the time anyone looked carefully for it, had all but vanished. A rath is an enclosed circular settlement of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and they remain relatively common across the Irish countryside. This one, however, had been absorbed so thoroughly into the working landscape that when surveyors visited in October 1983, no visible surface trace of the monument survived at all.

The story of its disappearance is readable in layers. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838 recorded the site clearly as a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across, so it was at least recognisable well into the nineteenth century. By the time Cody examined the site in 1989, only two fragmentary sections of the original earthen bank remained, separated by a field wall that had been driven straight through the monument from northeast to southwest. To the southeast of that wall, what little survived of the bank had been further obscured by a hay-shed and a lean-to built directly across it. To the northwest, an orchard had taken root in the remaining arc of raised ground. Between the field wall bisecting it, the agricultural buildings encroaching from one side, and the orchard planting on the other, the rath had been quietly dismantled by ordinary rural use across several generations, with no single act of destruction to point to.