At Clooncoose in County Clare, a subcircular stone enclosure sits on a gentle north-facing slope in good grazing land, looking for all the world like a feature of genuine antiquity. It was logged in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, the kind of official recognition usually reserved for ringforts, burial grounds, and other survivals of early Irish settlement. On aerial photography it reads as a coherent, enclosed form, the sort of cropmark or tonal shadow that catches an archaeologist's eye.

When the site was physically inspected in 1999, though, the picture changed. The enclosure measures roughly sixteen metres in internal diameter and is defined by a wall built from upright stone slabs, a straightforward construction technique with no particular claim to age. The assessment concluded that it was of apparently modern construction. In other words, a farmer or landowner at some relatively recent point built a functional stone enclosure, and the landscape quietly absorbed it until it looked, from the air at least, like something far older. It is a small reminder of how much archaeological mapping depends on aerial interpretation, and how a feature can accumulate the appearance of significance simply by sitting in a field long enough.