The enclosure at Lisheennaheltia belongs firmly to the second category. When the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1930, it recorded a subcircular enclosure running roughly forty metres on its north-south axis, its outline already interrupted by a field wall cutting across both the north-east and south-east. By the time anyone thought to look closely at the ground itself, extensive quarrying had removed whatever physical trace had remained. There is nothing to see here now.

What the map preserved, even briefly, was most likely the ghost of an early enclosure of the kind that punctuates the Irish landscape in various states of survival. The roughly circular or subcircular form, in that forty-metre range, is consistent with a class of enclosed settlement that includes ringforts, the earthen or stone-walled farmsteads built and occupied predominantly during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. Whether this particular enclosure was of that type, or something older or functionally different, the surviving record does not confirm. What is noted is that a ringfort lies roughly a hundred metres to the north, suggesting this part of Lisheennaheltia once held more than one feature of early human activity, even if one of them is now entirely gone. The references attached to the site, from researchers Knight and Conway working in the mid-to-late 1970s, caught it at a point when the quarrying damage was presumably already advanced.

The site sits in grassland in north County Galway, and there is no practical reason to seek it out as a destination in itself. Its interest is cartographic and conceptual rather than physical: a reminder that the archaeological record is always incomplete, and that the 1930 map captured something the ground no longer holds.