At Glashare in Co. Kilkenny, a site that spent years on the official record as a scheduled earthwork is, in reality, a natural island rising above the flood plain, its surface scattered with broken stone that appears to be debris from quarrying on its eastern side. When inspectors visited in 1987, they found no visible trace of an enclosure, the very feature that had justified its classification in the first place.

The confusion began with an aerial photograph that suggested something deliberate in the landscape. That initial reading was enough to earn the site a formal listing. A later aerial photograph, taken on 20 August 1991, complicated the picture further: it revealed a roughly triangular, irregular enclosure apparently defined by two sets of banks and fosses, a foss being a ditch or trench, typically cut as part of a boundary or defensive arrangement. Barrett, who examined this photograph as part of an unpublished aerial survey report that year, noted these features but the prevailing interpretation is cautious; they may relate to drainage rather than to any deliberate enclosure or settlement activity. The island itself, quarried and strewn with stone, sits somewhere between the genuinely archaeological and the purely geological, a place that has accumulated meanings it may not quite deserve.