It was discovered from space, or close enough: an oval variation in vegetation growth spotted on satellite imagery in 2017, visible only because the plants growing over an ancient buried structure were behaving differently from those around them. That the monument reveals itself through botany rather than stone or earthwork says something about how thoroughly the raised bog has absorbed it.

What survives on the ground is subtle. The enclosure is oval, measuring roughly 16 metres north to south and 12 metres east to west, and its boundary is marked by a low bank, now only about 25 centimetres high and just over three metres wide. What makes it legible, even on foot, is the vegetation. A dense ring of bog myrtle, a low aromatic shrub common in wet Irish habitats, traces the eastern arc; a sparser but still distinct ring follows the western side. Occasional heather breaks through the myrtle. Around the exterior there is a probable fosse, the term for a defensive or boundary ditch, here shallow at roughly ten centimetres deep and a little over two metres wide, and so poorly drained that it is blanketed in sphagnum moss. The interior is level and covered in bog cotton and low heather, much the same as the surrounding bog, which gives the enclosure an uncanny quality: you could stand inside it and not be entirely sure you were. A second enclosure lies approximately 38 metres to the north-north-west, suggesting this was not an isolated feature in the landscape.

The bog itself works as both preservative and disguise. Raised bogs in Clare accumulate slowly over millennia, sealing what lies beneath in acidic, oxygen-poor conditions while their living surface shifts and settles in ways that can, if you know what to look for, betray the shapes of older human activity underneath. In this case, it took a satellite and a careful eye to read the signal.