Walk the pasture on this north-east-facing slope in County Cork and you will find no earthwork, no ridge, no trace of anything beneath your feet. The enclosure here exists, as far as visitors are concerned, only from the air, where it appears as a large circular crop-mark, the kind of ghostly outline that forms when buried features alter how grass or grain grows above them, leaving a ring that only becomes legible at altitude and in the right season.

What that crop-mark outlines is thought to be the circular formal garden associated with Cor Castle, a structure recorded separately in the archaeological inventory for the area. The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which were produced across Ireland from the 1830s onwards and remain one of the most detailed records of the pre-Famine landscape, show the garden here quite clearly, suggesting it was still a legible feature of the estate at the time of the survey. Somewhere between that cartographic moment and the present, the garden was absorbed into agricultural land, its geometry surviving only as a subterranean echo.