At a location in Coolvin, County Westmeath, what was once recorded as an earthwork, the kind of term that usually conjures raised banks, ditched enclosures, or the softened outlines of long-vanished structures, turns out to be nothing more than a bend in the road. No mound, no ditch, no trace of anything worked by human hands for any purpose older than the tarmac itself.

When investigators visited the site, they found no visible trace of an antiquity and no evidence to suggest that an archaeological monument had ever existed there. The entry was compiled by Frank Coyne and Caimin O'Brien and uploaded in September 2018. It is, in its own way, a small monument to the difficulty of maintaining a national record of ancient sites: coordinates shift, maps are misread, field boundaries change, and occasionally a curving hedgerow or the gentle arc of a country road can, at the right angle or on the right old map, look uncannily like something it is not.