This one announces itself with nothing at all. The enclosure at Curraghmarky exists, as far as a visitor on the ground is concerned, purely as an absence: no visible bank, no ditch, no trace of whatever boundary once defined this patch of upland Tipperary. Its existence is known only because a camera mounted in an aircraft caught it on the 8th of April 1974, in the right light and at the right angle, as part of a Geological Survey of Ireland photographic run. Without that single aerial photograph, the site would have passed entirely unrecorded.

The enclosure sits on a west-facing slope of rising ground above the Gortnageragh river valley, in the kind of upland terrain that tends to preserve ancient features simply because later agriculture never pressed too hard upon it. Except, in this case, it did press hard enough to remove the field boundaries to the north and east, and to erase whatever surface expression the enclosure once had. The surrounding landscape does carry other traces of early activity: a ring-barrow lies roughly 220 metres to the south. A ring-barrow is a burial monument of prehistoric date, typically a mound enclosed within a circular ditch, and its proximity here is suggestive, if not conclusive, of a wider pattern of early use in the area. A possible further enclosure has been noted about 800 metres to the northwest, though its nature remains uncertain.

There is nothing to see at ground level, and that, in a way, is the most instructive thing about this place. It serves as a reminder of how much of the Irish archaeological landscape survives only in archive photographs, visible briefly when shadow and soil moisture conspire to reveal a crop mark or a parch mark that centuries of ordinary looking had missed.