At Lissylisheen in County Clare, a subcircular enclosure roughly 24 metres in diameter sat quietly on a north-facing slope for decades, catalogued in both the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, carrying the quiet implication that it might be something old and worth protecting. It was visible on aerial photography and clearly marked on the 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map. On paper, it had the look of a ringfort or similar early enclosure; the kind of circular earthwork or walled boundary, usually associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, that dots the Irish landscape in thousands of variations.

When someone finally visited in 1998 to inspect the site properly, the reality was considerably more mundane. The enclosure was modern, built from drystone walling, the traditional technique of stacking unmortared stone that has been used across rural Ireland for centuries in contexts entirely unrelated to archaeology. A hayshed had been constructed on part of it, partially dismantling the perimeter wall in the process. The site's presence on the 1916 map and in aerial photographs had been enough to earn it a place in the national record, but closer inspection resolved the ambiguity firmly in favour of the unremarkable. It is a reminder that the Irish landscape is densely layered, and that circular or subcircular shapes in fields can belong to any period, or to no particular period of historical significance at all.