On a south-facing hillslope at Coorloum in County Cork, a circular stone enclosure was recorded in 1995, measuring thirteen metres across, its wall built in a careful double-skin construction: an inner and an outer row of upright slabs with smaller stones and clay packed between them. A pair of parallel slabs at the eastern side marked what appeared to be an entrance. Ten years later, the structure was gone.

The enclosure was documented in 1995, with details provided by a local contact, Connie Murphy, who described a wall roughly a metre wide and half a metre high sitting in rough pasture on boggy ground. That kind of double-skinned construction, with upright slabs forming the faces of the wall and rubble filling the core, is a fairly consistent feature of early enclosures found across Munster, though without excavation it is rarely possible to assign a precise date or function to a site like this one. Enclosures of this type could have served as animal pounds, settlement boundaries, or ritual spaces, and the boggy hillside setting at Coorloum would not have been unusual for any of those purposes. When the site was revisited in 2005, land reclamation work had altered the hillside sufficiently that the structure could no longer be identified on the ground.

What remains is a description in an inventory and a set of measurements that now refer to something that cannot be verified in the landscape. The enclosure at Coorloum sits in the record as a small, precise account of a wall that was there and then was not, its eastern entrance still pointing, on paper at least, towards where the morning light would have come in.