The enclosure recorded near Kildimo in County Limerick is a case in point: a site that survives in the archive but not in the field, a monument that exists now only as a shape on an old map and a note about its disappearance.

When surveyed and depicted on a 1923 map, the site appeared as a sub-oval enclosure, roughly 20 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, sitting in a natural hollow at the base of a west-facing slope. Enclosures of this general type are common across the Irish countryside, many of them the remains of early medieval ringforts, which were enclosed farmsteads typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch and used as the basic unit of rural settlement for several centuries. Whether this particular example was of that character or something else entirely is now impossible to say. When the site was formally inspected, no trace of the monument was evident on the ground. The landowner, when consulted, reported that the enclosure had been removed during the 1930s, a decade when agricultural improvement schemes and the practical demands of farming led to the clearance of a considerable number of such earthworks across Ireland. The record was compiled by Denis Power and uploaded in August 2011.

For anyone making their way to this part of County Limerick, there is, frankly, little to see. The pasture land at the base of the slope holds no visible trace of what was once recorded there. The value of coming, if there is one, lies in the exercise itself: standing in a field that the map says should contain something, and finding instead only grass. The hollow in the landscape that originally drew or sheltered the enclosure may still be faintly legible in the topography, though that requires some imagination and a quiet afternoon.