At Lismiraun in County Mayo, a rath, the earthen-banked ringfort that was once among the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, has been so thoroughly absorbed into the surrounding field system that it takes some patience to read what remains.

By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded this site on its 1913 six-inch map, the rath appeared as a subcircular enclosure roughly 30 metres across, already clipped at the west and north by straight field boundaries, and bisected near its centre by a road running on a roughly north-northeast to south-southwest axis. That road has since been removed, but the field wall that ran along its western edge remains, cutting directly across the interior. Everything to the east of this wall has been levelled, leaving only faint undulations in the ground to suggest where the enclosure once sat. The western half survives, approximately 28 metres north to south and 13 metres east to west, but it is hemmed in tightly on three sides by later field walls. The southern bank, around 4.5 metres wide and barely 0.4 metres high on the interior, curves gently east to west before its outer face disappears, cut vertical and incorporated into a straight boundary wall. At the north, a slight curving rise in the ground is all that remains of another section of bank, similarly pressed into service as a field boundary on its outer edge. A row of low stones just west of the central dividing wall may trace the rath's original outer limit. The surviving interior is rough, stony underfoot, and overgrown with a dense tangle of blackthorn and hawthorn scrub. A separate enclosure lies approximately 150 metres to the southeast, suggesting that this small rise was once a more purposefully organised patch of landscape than its current condition implies.