In a pasture on an east-facing slope at Cloonty in County Limerick, something very much like this survives, or rather, almost does not. The site does not appear on Ordnance Survey Ireland maps at all, and there is nothing on the ground to suggest that anything of archaeological significance ever stood here. What gives it away is the crop itself.

The site was identified by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland through examination of aerial photography gathered under the ASIAP programme, a national initiative that uses low-level aerial survey to locate sites that have left no upstanding remains. A circular cropmark, roughly thirty metres in diameter, became clearly legible on a Google Earth orthoimage captured on 20 October 2010. Cropmarks of this kind form when buried features such as filled ditches or collapsed walls affect how soil retains moisture, causing the vegetation above them to grow at a slightly different rate or turn a subtly different colour than the surrounding ground. When seen from above under the right conditions, these variations describe the ghost of a structure below. In this case, the shape suggests a levelled enclosure, the type of circular or near-circular bounded space that appears throughout the Irish landscape and that may have served as a farmstead, a defended homestead, or a site with ritual significance, depending on period and context. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded to the Sites and Monuments Record in July 2020.

Because the site is in private agricultural land and carries no surface features, there is nothing to see from a public road or footpath in any conventional sense. The enclosure is most legible through satellite imagery, and anyone curious about it would do well to examine the Google Earth orthoimage from October 2010, which shows the cropmark at its most distinct. Cropmarks are most pronounced during dry summers, when differential moisture stress in the soil becomes visible above, so aerial images taken during or shortly after a dry spell will tend to reveal the most detail. The absence of this site from the standard mapping layers is itself a reminder of how much of the Irish archaeological record remains known only to specialists, glimpsed briefly from altitude and catalogued before the next season of ploughing or pasture management obscures it again.