The enclosure at Carnane, in County Limerick, belongs firmly to the second category. It was not found by an archaeologist walking a field or turning a spade, but by someone studying photographs taken from the air, where the subtle differences in crop growth and soil tone that betray buried or long-vanished structures become suddenly legible.

The site was identified by The Discovery Programme, an Irish archaeological research body, using medium-altitude aerial photographs taken in 1986. It forms part of the broader Ballyhoura Hills Project, a systematic survey of the landscape straddling the Limerick and Cork borderlands. That project's findings were published in 2008 by archaeologist M. Doody in a monograph issued through Wordwell, cataloguing a range of monuments across the region and placing individual sites like this one within their wider landscape context. The enclosure itself is recorded under the reference LI022, cross-referenced to the Bruff map sheets 6601 and 6602 and the aerial photograph reference AP 4/3703. An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is simply a defined area bounded by some form of barrier, whether a bank, ditch, wall, or combination of these, though without further investigation the precise form and date of this particular example remain uncertain.

Because the monument was detected through aerial survey rather than ground investigation, there is currently no excavated evidence to indicate its age or function. Visitors to the Carnane area will find no signage marking the spot, and nothing obvious is likely to be visible at ground level. The surrounding countryside falls within the Ballyhoura landscape, a gently rolling rural area where similar crop-mark sites are scattered across farmland. Anyone with a serious interest in the record can consult Doody's 2008 monograph, which situates this and comparable sites within a detailed regional framework, or search the National Monuments Service database using the reference number above. The site sits on privately owned agricultural land, so any visit would require landowner permission.