An aerial photograph captured what appeared to be an enclosure, and a number of small cairns were noted in the surrounding area, prompting the site to be logged as a potential archaeological feature and later catalogued under the heading of cairns. For a few years in the 1990s, it sat in official records alongside genuine prehistoric monuments, quietly accumulating the administrative weight of a site worth watching.

When a ground inspection was carried out in 1997, the story became considerably more deflating. The enclosure turned out to be a drystone-walled rectangular structure of modern construction, and the cairns, the conical mounds of stacked stone that had caught the attention of recorders, were clearance cairns, also modern. Clearance cairns are exactly what the name suggests: piles of stone gathered and heaped by farmers clearing ground for grazing or cultivation, a thoroughly practical response to the rocky terrain of the Burren's limestone pavement. There was no archaeology here, only the residue of agricultural labour misread at altitude. The site had been listed in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 before anyone had walked the ground to check.

The episode is a small, instructive example of how aerial survey, invaluable as it is for spotting earthworks and enclosures invisible at ground level, can produce confident-looking misidentifications when the underlying landscape is as ambiguous as the thin-soiled limestone plateau of east Clare. The Burren is full of features, natural and human-made, that cast shadows and outlines suggestive of great age. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are a farmer's cleared field and a wall put up last century.