The enclosure at Addane in County Tipperary offers none of that. It is, to all practical purposes, gone, and what makes it worth knowing about is precisely the forensic clarity with which its disappearance can be traced.

On the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed around 1840, a roughly circular enclosure is clearly marked on the north-east-facing slope of a hill, sitting on a natural spur above the surrounding pastureland. Circular enclosures of this kind, typically consisting of a raised bank and internal ditch, are among the most common earthwork monuments in Ireland, used variously as farmsteads, ceremonial spaces, or settlement sites across many centuries. By the time the revised Ordnance Survey edition appeared in 1904, the feature had already been dropped from the map, suggesting its condition had deteriorated enough by then to be deemed no longer legible. According to the landowner, however, the site was only completely levelled in the twelve or so years before 1984, when the field was reclaimed for agriculture and new drainage ditches were cut across it. The enclosure that had survived, in some form, for well over a thousand years was erased within living memory.

Nothing is visible at ground level today. The slope has been absorbed into ordinary farmland, the new ditches bearing no relation to the ancient boundary that once curved across the hillside. The interest here is less archaeological than historical in a quieter sense: the 1840 map becomes the monument, the only surviving record of a shape in the landscape that is otherwise completely lost.