That combination of absence and mistaken identity gives this otherwise unremarkable patch of ground an odd distinction among the many earthworks catalogued along Ireland's western seaboard.

The enclosure appeared on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1837 as a circular embanked feature, somewhere between fifteen and twenty metres in diameter, sitting on slightly elevated coastal pasture with field boundaries running along its northern and eastern sides. An embanked enclosure of this kind typically consists of a low earthen ring, raised above the surrounding ground, and such features in Ireland range in date and function from prehistoric settlements to early medieval farmsteads. By the time the Ordnance Survey revisited the area for its 1913 edition, the enclosure had vanished from the map entirely, leaving no explanation for its disappearance and no visible trace on the ground. When a field inspection was carried out in 1993, surveyors found what looked like a promising candidate roughly sixty-five metres to the north-west: a roughly rectangular area of uneven ground, about twenty-one metres east to west and twenty-five metres north to south, edged on its eastern side by a low, narrow bank no more than half a metre high and a metre wide. It was recorded at the time as the remains of the enclosure. It was not. Subsequent assessment concluded that the bank is most likely a relict field fence, a buried or degraded boundary from an old agricultural layout, and that the actual enclosure shown on the 1837 map has left no discernible trace whatsoever.

What remains, then, is a record of something that was once considered significant enough to map, a confusion that persisted for years in the archaeological record, and a field in Sligo that looks exactly like every other field in Sligo.