On a rocky rise near Croagh in County Clare, a circular enclosure once sat in what is now improved pasture, visible on the 1916 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map but gone, by all measurable evidence, long before anyone thought to look for it on the ground.

The structure was a caher, an Irish term for a stone-walled enclosure, typically circular or subcircular in plan, that served as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period. When the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited and recorded it in 1901, he described it as a "bramble-pestered circular caher nearly levelled to the field" and measured it at around 80 feet, or roughly 24 metres, in diameter. That it was already nearly levelled by Westropp's time tells its own story; the stone had most likely been robbed out over the preceding centuries to build field walls or farm structures, a fate that befell countless such enclosures across Clare and the wider west of Ireland. When the site was inspected again in 1999, no ground-level remains could be found at all. The enclosure survives only as a cartographic trace and a note in Westropp's fieldwork, its outline preserved on paper long after the last stone was taken.