The enclosure at Ballyea, in County Limerick, does the opposite. It has been so thoroughly reduced that its very category is uncertain, and the clearest view of it today comes not from standing on the ground but from satellite imagery, where a cropmark, the faint discolouration in vegetation that betrays buried or levelled structure beneath a field, traces the ghost of something that was once substantial enough to organise a community around.

When O'Kelly surveyed the site in the early 1940s, the findings were recorded in 1943 with a candour that is itself revealing. Only one small fragment of the bank survived at that point, composed mainly of earth with a considerable proportion of stones, though the stones showed no signs of having been used as a formal facing. The fosse, the encircling ditch that typically defines an Irish ring fort, either never existed or had been so completely filled in that no trace remained. Ring forts, to give them their common name, were the enclosed farmsteads and settlement sites of early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and many thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. At Ballyea, the overall diameter of approximately 55 metres was enough to suggest a structure of some significance, but little else could be confirmed. The levelling was too complete to say with certainty what type of enclosure this had been.

For the visitor, this is a site that rewards a particular kind of attention. There is no visible monument to stand beside, and access would be across agricultural land, so enquiring locally before approaching is advisable. The cropmark that confirms the enclosure's outline is visible on Digital Globe aerial photographs, and consulting these before visiting gives a useful sense of scale and position. The best time to spot cropmarks in the landscape, for those who know what to look for, is during dry summer conditions, when differential soil moisture above buried features affects the growth of surface vegetation. What Ballyea offers is less a monument than an absence, a place where the evidence for something having once existed is almost entirely underground, readable only from above or through the careful archive notes of surveyors who got there before even that last fragment was gone.