It is an unassuming thing, easy to pass without a second glance, yet its presence in the official record has its own minor story to tell about how ancient structures get categorised and then quietly corrected.

The site at Coolnatullagh was entered into the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 under the broad label of "enclosure", a term used in Irish archaeology to cover a wide range of roughly circular or rectangular features defined by banks, walls, or ditches, often of prehistoric or early medieval date. When someone finally inspected the site on the ground in 1997, what they found was rather more modest in character: a subrectangular field of about 28 metres across, bounded by a single drystone wall that was, by all accounts, well built. Drystone construction, which uses carefully selected and fitted stones without mortar, can be extremely durable and is found across many periods in the Irish landscape. Whether this particular wall belongs to antiquity or a more recent agricultural past is not recorded, but the distinction between an ancient "enclosure" and an old field boundary is exactly the kind of thing that only a site visit can resolve. The level rock pavement beneath it, characteristic of the Burren's karst geology, would have made it a practical spot to work with stone.