Somewhere in Co. Clare, a circular earthwork that had stood long enough to be carefully mapped by the Ordnance Survey was gone by 1995, obliterated in the course of quarrying. What had been a legible feature of the landscape became, in the space of a few decades, a blank.

The monument had been recorded on the Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map and again on the later twenty-five-inch survey, appearing each time as a single-banked sub-circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter. That shape and scale is consistent with a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval enclosed settlement in Ireland, in which a circular earthen bank defined a farmstead or high-status residence. Thousands survive across the country; many thousands more have been lost to agriculture, development, and, as here, extraction industries. The quarrying that removed the Ballybrody enclosure left no visible surface trace, meaning that even the negative impression of the bank, which sometimes persists after levelling, has been erased entirely. The site survives only as a pair of map symbols and a record.