Standing on the flat pasture here, with wide views opening in every direction, there is almost nothing to see, and yet the ground itself is a kind of archive.

The enclosure was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the great nineteenth-century surveys that captured the Irish landscape in extraordinary detail, including features that were already fading even then. Enclosures of this type, roughly circular or, as here, D-shaped in plan, were typically used as defended or bounded settlements from the early medieval period onwards, a category that overlaps with the more familiar ringfort. By the time the OS surveyors were working, the structure at Carneycastle had already been substantially destroyed, surviving only as a cartographic outline and a gentle anomaly in the pasture. Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien documented it in their archaeological inventory of North Tipperary, published in 2002, by which point it was noted as not visible at ground level beyond that faint rise of earth.