Sometimes the most quietly puzzling things are absences. At a townland called Dairyfarm in County Kildare, there is a site that exists now only as a mark on an old map, a circular enclosure recorded by the surveyor and cartographer Alexander Taylor in his 1783 map of County Kildare. On the ground today, nothing remains to indicate it was ever there.

Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, ranging from prehistoric ring-forts and early medieval raths, which were typically earthen-banked farmstead enclosures, to ecclesiastical sites and enclosures of less certain purpose. Taylor's map is a useful document for this kind of research precisely because it captures features of the late eighteenth-century landscape that were sometimes already ancient by that point, and which subsequent land improvement, ploughing, and development would go on to erase entirely. Whatever the Dairyfarm enclosure was, its circular form would have been visible to Taylor's surveyors in 1783, clear enough to merit inclusion. That it has left no surface trace at all suggests it was levelled sometime in the intervening two and a half centuries, most likely through agricultural activity that gradually reduced an earthen bank to nothing.