At Bayswell in County Kilkenny, an enclosure of considerable size once marked the landscape, yet today a visitor standing in the field would see nothing at all to indicate it was ever there.

The first solid evidence for the enclosure comes from the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1839, which shows a roughly oval form measuring approximately 43 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and around 32 metres across. Curiously, the southern side of this oval appears to have been straight rather than curved, running for roughly 25 metres, which sets it apart from the typical profile of a simple ringfort or enclosure. By the time the next major edition of the OS map was produced around 1900, the picture had already changed considerably: only the southern arc of the enclosure was still being depicted, suggesting that the northern portion had by then been absorbed into the surrounding agricultural landscape. The site sits on reclaimed land that rises gently from a valley bottom, and a field boundary running roughly east-south-east to west-north-west now bisects whatever remains of the original form beneath the surface. Enclosures of this kind are not uncommon in the Irish midlands and south-east, ranging from prehistoric settlements to early medieval farmsteads, though without excavation it is impossible to assign Bayswell's enclosure to any particular period or function.

The fact that the enclosure has vanished entirely at ground level, surviving only in the cartographic record and, presumably, as a buried feature detectable through geophysical survey or aerial photography, is itself part of what makes it worth noting. The landscape has moved on; the enclosure, quietly, has not.