The enclosure at Carnane, in County Limerick, belongs to the second category. It came to light not through excavation or local tradition, but through a set of medium-altitude aerial photographs taken in 1986, in which the faint geometry of a buried or earthwork enclosure became legible against the surrounding farmland. That kind of discovery is quietly unsettling in its own way: a feature of the landscape that people have walked past, farmed around, and perhaps unknowingly built upon, suddenly made visible by a change in angle and altitude.

The monument was identified as part of the work of the Discovery Programme, an Irish research body established to bring systematic, multi-disciplinary methods to the study of the country's archaeological heritage. The Carnane enclosure is catalogued under the reference LI022: Bruff 61: AP 4/3703, placing it within the broader survey of the Bruff area of County Limerick. The aerial photographic record was subsequently incorporated into the Ballyhoura Hills Project, a major regional study published in 2008 by archaeologist M. Doody as Discovery Programme Monograph No. 7. That volume drew together evidence from aerial photography, field survey, and archival research across the Ballyhoura uplands and their surrounding lowlands, and the Carnane enclosure is discussed within its pages alongside dozens of comparable sites. An enclosure, in this archaeological sense, typically refers to an area defined by a bank, ditch, wall, or some combination of these, and can date from anywhere between the prehistoric period and the early medieval. Without excavation, it is rarely possible to say more than that.

Because the monument was identified from aerial photography rather than ground survey, there may be little to see at ground level on a visit to the Carnane area. Cropmarks and soilmarks, which are the shadows that buried features cast in growing grain or parched grass, can be entirely invisible when you are standing among them. The surrounding landscape, south County Limerick farmland in the shadow of the Ballyhoura Hills, is nonetheless worth understanding as an area that has been settled and worked continuously for millennia. Anyone with a serious interest in the site should consult Doody's 2008 monograph, which remains the most detailed published account of the archaeological landscape in this part of Limerick.