There is something quietly unsettling about a place that exists more convincingly on paper than it does in the ground. In the townland of Park, County Waterford, a circular enclosure roughly fifty metres across occupies a south-east-facing slope in what is now ordinary pasture. Walk across the field and you would find nothing to suggest anything was ever there. No earthwork, no rim of raised ground, no visible trace at all.

What we do know comes from the Ordnance Survey's six-inch mapping of 1840, on which the enclosure appears, if faintly. Circular enclosures of this kind are broadly understood to be the remains of a rath or ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common throughout early medieval Ireland, typically formed by one or more banks and ditches surrounding a central living area. Thousands of them survive across the country in various states of preservation, but many others have been levelled over the centuries by ploughing, drainage, or simple agricultural pressure. The fact that this one left only a ghost on a nineteenth-century map suggests it had already largely disappeared by the time the surveyors came through, recorded as an outline rather than a feature.