Walk the ground at Drumroe today and there is nothing to see; no bank, no ditch, no shadow in the grass to betray what was once recorded there.

What we know comes from the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1840, which shows a roughly circular enclosure on the hillside. Circular or subcircular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, and they range widely in age and purpose, from prehistoric farmsteads to early medieval ringforts, the latter being enclosed homesteads typically surrounded by an earthen bank and ditch. The fact that this one was already reduced enough by the nineteenth century to require cartographic recording rather than physical description suggests it had been losing its definition for some time, slowly absorbed back into the undulating countryside around it. Its survival now is essentially documentary, a shape caught by surveyors before it disappeared entirely.