The wall does not know this, of course, and neither would most people walking past. What was once a roughly circular embanked enclosure, about twenty metres across, has been so thoroughly levelled that the only hint of its former presence is a barely perceptible rise in the ground, with no clearly defined outline to guide the eye.

The enclosure appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, drawn as a rath-like form, meaning it resembled the type of circular earthwork, usually defined by a bank and ditch, commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland. By the time the more detailed twenty-five-inch OS plan was made, it was recorded as a circular hachured feature bisected by a laneway running northeast to southwest. That laneway is now echoed by the field wall that cuts across roughly the same axis today. When the six-inch edition was revised in 1922, the enclosure had already vanished from the cartographic record entirely, suggesting it was levelled sometime in the decades between the two surveys. A farmstead sits immediately to the east, and the steady expansion and reorganisation of agricultural land during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries accounts for the disappearance of countless such features across rural Ireland.

What makes this particular patch of unremarkable pasture worth pausing over is what lies just twenty metres to the northeast: a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic monument dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, typically consisting of a roofed gallery that narrows toward one end. The proximity of the later enclosure to this much older monument is a reminder that people returning to a landscape often returned to the same places, for reasons we can only partially reconstruct.