Others vanish so completely into the landscape that the only proof of their existence is a single aerial photograph taken on a spring day half a century ago. On a steep south-facing slope above the River Ara in Bohercrow, County Tipperary, there is an enclosure that falls into this second category. The pasture around it has been improved, the ground levelled and grazed, and no surface trace of the monument remains. Whatever boundary once defined this place, whether a bank, a ditch, a wall, or some combination of these, it has been absorbed entirely into the working farmland around it.

What we know comes from a single aerial photograph, reference GSI R. 517/16, taken on the 16th of April 1974 as part of a Geological Survey of Ireland survey flight. From the air, variations in soil colour, crop growth, or vegetation density can reveal the outlines of buried or levelled features that are otherwise invisible at ground level. These are known as crop marks or soil marks, and they have been responsible for identifying thousands of prehistoric and early medieval sites across Ireland. In this case, the photograph showed enough to confirm the presence of an enclosure on the slope, roughly 25 metres north of the River Ara. Whether the site was a farmstead, a ritual enclosure, or something else entirely, the photograph alone cannot say.