At Ballycahill in County Clare, a feature recorded as an enclosure on official inventories sits tucked into a slight natural hollow in a rocky landscape where the view is deliberately or incidentally curtailed. The expectation, when approaching such a listing, is of something ancient, perhaps the remains of a ringfort or a pastoral enclosure from the early medieval period. What inspection revealed was considerably less romantic, and arguably more interesting for it.

When the site was physically examined after its appearance in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, the enclosure proved to be an irregular roughly circular form around fifty-five metres in diameter, defined by a loosely built drystone wall. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies entirely on the careful stacking of stone, has been practised in Ireland from prehistory through to the present day, which makes dating by technique alone notoriously unreliable. In this case, however, the construction was judged to be of modern rather than ancient origin. A section of the wall along the western side has since been removed entirely. A smaller enclosure, overlapping the main one to the south, also appears to be of modern construction. The site, in other words, is a case where the landscape quietly mimics the archaeological record without actually belonging to it.