A circular enclosure on the commons of County Clare, sitting near the western base of a steep ridge, was recorded as a formal monument in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. It had the look of something ancient from the air, visible in aerial photography and carrying the generic designation of "enclosure", a category that can encompass everything from early medieval farmsteads to prehistoric ritual sites.

When inspectors visited in 1999, the picture shifted. The enclosure, roughly 25 metres in diameter, turned out to be of apparently modern construction, its boundary formed by a narrow wall of loosely piled stones. Near the centre sat three small clearance cairns, the kind of low mounds that accumulate when someone has methodically gathered surface stones from ground they intend to work or graze. Clearance cairns are a common feature of improved land across Ireland, the physical residue of agricultural tidying rather than ceremony or commemoration. The enclosure wall itself fits the same pattern: a boundary thrown up to define a patch of common ground, functional rather than ancient. What the aerial photograph had suggested as a site of potential antiquity turned out to be the traces of relatively recent land management, someone making practical order out of a stony field at the foot of a ridge.