But the D-shaped enclosure at Cill Bhríde, sitting at the base of a steep north-facing slope above Lough Mask, has a quiet persistence about it. The wall, just forty centimetres wide and standing between sixty centimetres and just over a metre high, traces out an interior roughly thirteen metres east to west and eight metres north to south. It is a modest thing, and probably always was.

The enclosure appears on both the 1838 and 1920 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which places it firmly within the landscape of nineteenth-century rural life in the west of Ireland. Field inspection concluded that it was most likely used to contain farm stock, associated with a settlement of that era. Drystone construction of this kind, built without mortar by laying stones so that their weight and arrangement hold them in place, was the ordinary building method for agricultural enclosures across Connacht. The bracken-covered rough pasture surrounding it today hints at how marginal this ground has always been, the kind of land that smallholders worked when better ground was not available. The north-facing slope above would have offered little shelter, and the enclosure may have been as much about keeping animals from straying as about any particular management of grazing.