On a east-to-west terrace of reclaimed pasture in County Kilkenny, a roughly forty-metre square enclosure once occupied a gentle slope, its corners softened to the north-east and north-west, its southern edge nudged by a road. Today the ground gives no sign that anything was ever there.

The first Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland, carried out in 1839, recorded this site in considerable detail: a rectangular house oriented east to west, two projections along its northern face, and a scatter of small outbuildings ranged along the roadside. The enclosure itself functioned as the curtilage of that house, the bounded domestic ground surrounding a rural dwelling. By the time the Ordnance Survey returned to revise its six-inch maps around 1900, all of the buildings had been levelled. The revision still showed the enclosure as a low square platform, a ghost outline of what had stood within it. Sometime after that, even the platform was erased, leaving the site invisible at ground level. A place that was home, then ruin, then faint earthwork, then nothing.