Standing in the undulating pasture there, on a slight rise with a river running some fifty metres to the south, you would see nothing out of the ordinary. No earthwork, no shadow in low light, no depression in the grass. Whatever was once here has been absorbed so completely into the landscape that only cartographic records preserve any memory of it.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838 marks a circular enclosure roughly thirty-five to forty metres in diameter at this location. Enclosures of this kind are among the most common monument types in the Irish countryside, typically the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built in the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. By the time the next edition of the OS map was produced in 1931, the picture had already changed considerably: what the earlier survey had recorded as a complete circle was by then shown only as a semi-circular arc, its southeastern to north-northwest extent incorporated into the surrounding field boundaries. In less than a century of documented mapping, the enclosure had gone from a legible circular form to a partial outline borrowed by the fields around it, and then, at some point after that, to nothing visible at all.