Somewhere in a pasture at Kilclooney, on a south-east-facing slope in County Waterford, there is a circular enclosure roughly forty metres across that you would walk straight over without knowing it. The earthwork is entirely invisible at ground level, its banks long since flattened by centuries of grazing and cultivation until nothing remains to catch the eye or the foot. What we know of it comes almost entirely from the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, on which a surveyor thought it significant enough to record, tracing a circle onto the landscape before it disappeared from view altogether.

Embanked enclosures of this kind, roughly circular areas defined by a raised earthen bank, are found across Ireland and belong to a broad tradition of enclosure stretching back through the early medieval period and in some cases much further. They served various purposes depending on their age and context, from settlement and farming to ritual use, and a diameter of around forty metres would be consistent with a modest but functional enclosure of the early historic period. Whether the Kilclooney example ever had an internal ditch, an entrance causeway, or any associated features is simply not known. The 1840 mapping is the last clear record of it as a readable form in the landscape.