No earthwork, no ditch, no bank, nothing to distinguish the pasture here from any other field in mid Cork. What makes the place quietly compelling is precisely this absence, and the long paper trail that documents a structure that was already fading from the landscape when surveyors first began mapping it seriously.

The site was recorded on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in 1842, then again in 1903, and once more in 1940, each time as a subrectangular enclosure measuring approximately twenty metres north to south and twenty-five metres east to west. An enclosure of this type, a roughly defined area bounded by an earthen bank or fosse, was one of the most common features of early medieval Irish settlement, often associated with a farmstead or small defended homestead. Over the course of those hundred years of mapping, the feature was becoming progressively harder to trace, and at some point between the last recorded survey and the present day it was levelled entirely, most likely by agricultural activity. What survives now is only the cartographic memory of it, three separate moments when someone looked at this slope and drew a closed shape on their map.