The enclosure at Clareen, in County Tipperary, does the opposite. Sitting on a flat plain amid open meadow, it presents itself as little more than a very slight rise in the ground, so modest that its full extent has never been satisfactorily traced.

An enclosure, in the Irish archaeological sense, typically refers to a defined area bounded by a bank, ditch, or wall, and such features were raised for many purposes across many centuries: farmsteads, ceremonial spaces, burial grounds, or the defended settlements known as raths. What makes the Clareen example quietly compelling is precisely its illegibility. Recorded by Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien in the Archaeological Inventory of County Tipperary, published in 2002, it is described only as a barely discernible raised area whose limits could not be ascertained. That phrase carries a certain honesty. The site resists easy categorisation, and nobody has yet established where it begins or ends.

There is something instructive about a place that archaeology can name but not fully read. The meadowland setting means there is nothing dramatic to see, and a visitor walking across the field might pass over the enclosure without noticing anything at all. That, in its own way, is the point.