The small enclosure at Cloghonan, in County Tipperary, offers none of that. It exists, for practical purposes, only as a shape caught on an aerial photograph taken in 1973, invisible to anyone standing on the hill itself. The ground above it is rough and uneven, tufted with grass and gorse, and those very irregularities, hillocky enough to break up any clear sightlines, are part of what keeps it hidden from view.

The enclosure sits within the eastern half of Knockadiggeen hillfort, a much larger prehistoric feature on the same landscape. Hillforts in Ireland are generally understood as substantial enclosures, often defined by banks and ditches following the contours of elevated ground, and their interiors could contain a range of smaller structures, some domestic, some possibly ceremonial. Whether the Cloghonan enclosure is contemporary with the hillfort, or belongs to a different period of activity on the site entirely, is not something the aerial evidence alone can settle. What the 1973 photograph did establish is that the feature is there, beneath the scrub and uneven terrain, waiting on methods that do not depend on a clear day and a low sun angle to reveal what ground-level survey cannot.