Somewhere in the flat pasture and tillage of County Westmeath, a ringfort, or rath, once occupied a gentle low rise. A rath is a circular earthen enclosure, typically surrounded by a bank and ditch, used as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period in Ireland. This one has been levelled entirely, yet it has not quite disappeared. Seen from above, the ghost of the structure remains as a cropmark, a circular patch of dark brown gravelly soil roughly 47 metres in diameter, the colour difference betraying the outline of the old fosse, the ditch that once ringed the enclosure, now backfilled but still legible to the soil and, above it, to crops.

The site was recorded as a roughly circular earthwork on the revised 1913 edition of the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, which suggests it was still at least partially intact at that point. By 1970, it had been reduced to a cropmark visible in tillage, with the inner edge of the old ditch still faintly preserved as a low, very smooth scarp running from south-southwest around through west and north to north-northeast. Agricultural clearance at some point between those two observations had done away with the above-ground remains entirely. What is remarkable is how much the buried archaeology continues to assert itself; aerial photography on Digital Globe imagery shows the cropmark persisting today, now appearing in pasture rather than tillage, the vegetation above the filled ditch still responding differently to moisture and nutrients than the surrounding ground.