The townland of Rathbal carries the word "rath" in its very name, a rath being the Irish term for a circular earthwork enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period, that once served as a farmstead or small defended settlement. And yet the ringfort that presumably inspired that name is, to all practical purposes, gone.

Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 capture the enclosure clearly, a circular feature somewhere between twenty and twenty-five metres in diameter, sitting on a low ridge in what is now pasture ground in County Mayo. The same outline reappears on the 1930 revision of the six-inch series, which means the earthwork was still legible, at least as a cartographic feature, well into the twentieth century. At some point after that it was levelled, whether through deliberate clearance for agriculture or gradual erosion under grazing pressure is not recorded. Today there is no visible trace at ground level.

What remains is essentially a place that exists more fully on paper than in the field. The ridge is still there, the pasture is still there, but the enclosure that once justified marking this spot on a map has been absorbed back into the landscape entirely.