It is not an accident of botany. The flowers are tracing the ghost of a wall, the remains of an enclosure that was already ancient when the first Ordnance Survey cartographers recorded it in 1842, and which has been dissolving into the hillside ever since.

The site sits within a large field system on the slopes below Knockauns, which rises to just under a thousand feet above sea level. It is roughly oval in plan, estimated at around thirty metres east to west and twenty-six metres north to south. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1901, noted four ring-walls in this part of Clare, each approximately a hundred feet in diameter, and this enclosure is almost certainly one of them. His account was not encouraging: three, he recorded, had already been levelled; the fourth was nearly gone. More than a century later, that assessment has proved accurate. No masonry is visible above ground. What remains is a very faint bank along the northern and north-eastern arc, draped in meadowsweet, and a more definite counter-scarp, rising to about 0.8 metres, along the western and north-western side. A counter-scarp is the outer face or lip of a ditch, and its survival here, even at that modest height, is enough to suggest where the enclosing boundary once ran. The grass-covered interior gives nothing away.

Enclosures of this type and size are broadly associated with early medieval settlement or agricultural use in Ireland, though without excavation it is impossible to say more about this one specifically. What is clear is that it was substantial enough to be mapped twice, in 1842 and again on the Cassini edition of 1915, and that it formed part of a wider, organised landscape of walls and enclosures on the mountain. Most of that landscape is now gone. This one persists, just barely, in a scatter of wildflowers and a low earthen lip curving through the grazing.