That gap between what maps show and what the land will actually yield is, in its quiet way, a small puzzle worth pausing over.

The first Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in 1839, marks a circular enclosure roughly twenty-three metres in diameter at the northern end of a small settlement cluster. Enclosures of this kind, typically earthen banks or ditches defining a roughly circular area, are one of the most common monument types in the Irish landscape and are frequently associated with early medieval farmsteads, though their dates and functions vary considerably. This one sat at the edge of a local roadway that curved around its southern and south-western arc, with a field boundary running north to south from its north-north-eastern side, suggesting it had already been partially absorbed into the working logic of the landscape by the time anyone thought to map it. By the time the 1900 revision was published, only the north-western quadrant was still being indicated. Buildings had encroached on the eastern side, and the road appears to have cut through the south-western quadrant entirely. When someone finally went to look for it on the ground in 1987, there was nothing to see at all. The enclosure had been mapped into near-oblivion across six decades of revision, each edition recording a little less than the one before.