The reason is not that it had been moved or destroyed, but that rhododendrons had swallowed it. The invasive shrub, introduced to Irish estates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and now a persistent problem across the west of Ireland, had grown so thickly through this stretch of woodland that the feature simply disappeared into it. It was there in 1993, carefully noted by Connie Murphy as a low earthen bank about a metre wide and thirty centimetres high, set on a level platform within an otherwise steep and heavily wooded slope. By the next time anyone went looking, the undergrowth had closed over it.

An enclosure of this kind, a roughly circular area defined by a bank or ditch, is a common enough form in the Irish archaeological record, associated broadly with early medieval settlement and land use, though individual examples are rarely easy to date without excavation. What makes the Cappyaughna site quietly interesting is not the enclosure itself but its company. Within about forty metres to the west lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically built as a place of storage or refuge, and eighty metres beyond that, another enclosure. The cluster suggests this hillside, now dense and largely inaccessible, was once a meaningful place in the landscape, organised and occupied rather than simply passed through.