This one in Gortlahard, County Kerry, is known almost entirely from a single aerial photograph taken in 1973, in which an oval enclosure, roughly 25 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, appears as a faint trace on a south-facing slope above the Sheen River valley. On the ground, it was never visible at all. The enclosure belongs to a category of earthwork common across early medieval Ireland, typically defined by a bank and ditch that might once have enclosed a farmstead, a burial ground, or a place of assembly, but here even those modest remains have been absorbed into the landscape entirely.

What the photograph caught was a shadow of something older lying beneath rough pasture, the kind of differential growth or soil discolouration that aerial archaeology is particularly good at detecting. By the time the site was formally recorded, the area had already been cleared and reclaimed for agricultural use, which means the photograph may preserve the only documentation this enclosure will ever have. It is a reminder that the record of a place and the place itself are not always the same thing, and that a considerable amount of what once existed in the Irish countryside now survives only as a grey smudge on mid-century aerial film.