At Grangefertagh, the settlement once known as the town of Fertagh left behind no standing walls, no legible street plan, only the subtle undulations of earthworks that only became properly visible when aerial photographers passed overhead in 1968.

The historical record for Fertagh is thin but pointed. Writing in 1905, the local historian Carrigan placed the town in the field lying between Steepleview House and the nearby churchyard, a fairly precise location that nonetheless describes a space now given over entirely to farmland and grass. The earthworks, the low ridges and hollows that represent the compressed remains of former buildings, boundaries, and yards, spread to the north, south, and west of the Augustinian abbey that still stands at Grangefertagh. Augustinian abbeys were communities of canons following the Rule of St Augustine, and it was common for small towns or service settlements to grow up around such foundations during the medieval period. Whether the settlement predated the abbey, grew alongside it, or gradually shrank as the religious house declined is not recorded. What is clear is that by the time anyone thought to look carefully, the town had long since returned to earth, its outline surviving only as a faint topographical memory.

The earthworks are not dramatic features and would be easy to walk across without recognising them for what they are. Low-angle light, particularly on a clear morning or evening in autumn or winter, tends to bring out the shadows that reveal such ground disturbance most clearly. The abbey itself remains a substantial ruin and is the more obvious landmark; the ghost of the town lies quietly in the surrounding fields.