At ground level, walking the field, you would find nothing at all to suggest that anything was ever there. The circular enclosure at Mountalt exists, to all practical purposes, as a photograph taken in 1973.

That photograph, part of the aerial survey catalogued as GSIAP S 465/6, captured what the ground no longer shows: a circular enclosure sitting on level ground at the crest of a hill that slopes away to the north-west. Circular enclosures of this kind are common in the Irish archaeological record and generally date from the early medieval period, though without excavation it is impossible to say precisely what this one was, or who built it. What can be said is that by the time anyone thought to document it formally, the landscape had already moved on. A field boundary that once ran east to west across the southern sector of the site has since been removed, and whatever earthwork traces remained have been lost to agriculture. The site appears in the Archaeological Inventory of County Tipperary, compiled by Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien and published in 2002, which places it in the North Tipperary volume covering this part of the county.

There is nothing here for a visitor to see, and that is precisely what makes it worth knowing about. Much of Ireland's early medieval archaeology survives only partially, or not at all at ground level, preserved instead in archive photographs and inventory entries. Mountalt is a quiet example of how quickly a site can pass from the visible world into the purely documentary one.