At Kiltoom in County Westmeath, tucked into the corner of a pasture field roughly 400 metres east of Lough Derravaragh, there sits what was catalogued as a possible enclosure, only to reveal itself on closer inspection as something considerably more ordinary. Two of its sides, the northern and eastern, have been levelled, and a modern house now occupies the eastern edge. What remains is the ghost of a boundary rather than a monument.

The enclosure appears to date from after 1700, making it a relatively recent feature in a landscape where genuine early medieval ringforts and prehistoric earthworks are not uncommon. Crucially, it does not appear as an antiquity on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, those meticulous nineteenth-century surveys that recorded field boundaries, ruins, and earthworks across the country with considerable care. Its absence from those maps as a marked antiquity suggests it was never regarded locally or officially as anything older than a working field boundary, most likely a rectangular enclosure of the kind used to subdivide agricultural land in the post-medieval period. The site is, in its own way, a reminder that the process of identifying and listing possible heritage features inevitably catches some sites that turn out to be something else entirely, and that the landscape around Lough Derravaragh holds plenty of layers, not all of them equally deep.