At Coolraheen in County Kilkenny, there is nothing left to see, and there may never have been very much to begin with. What once existed here was a small, roughly rectangular plantation of trees, measuring approximately 17 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, deliberately arranged in a pattern that marked it out as a designed landscape feature rather than natural growth or working woodland. Planted enclosures of this kind were a common enough gesture on improved estates from the eighteenth century onward, used to ornament a view, screen a building, or simply signal that someone had taken the trouble to impose order on the land.

The plantation appears on the 1900 revision Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet and on the 25-inch OS map of the same period, both of which show its neat rectangular outline clearly enough to allow later surveyors to identify its character and approximate dimensions. When fieldwork was carried out in 1987, however, the feature had vanished entirely, leaving no visible trace at ground level. It was recorded but judged insufficient to qualify as an archaeological monument, which places it in that quietly poignant category of things that existed, were mapped, and then ceased to exist before anyone thought to ask why they were planted in the first place.