At Eanty More in County Clare, a feature logged as an enclosure spent several years on the national inventory looking, from the air at least, like evidence of early settlement or field organisation. Enclosures in an Irish context usually suggest something old, a ringfort perhaps, or a stock enclosure associated with early medieval farming. The reality, when someone finally walked the ground, was rather more modest.

The feature first appeared as a cropmark or earthwork on an aerial photograph and was duly recorded as an enclosure in 1992 and again in 1996. It sits in a natural depression, which is precisely the kind of topography that can make a perfectly ordinary hollow look, from altitude, like a deliberate human construction. When the site was inspected on the ground in 1999, it turned out to be a wall of modern construction following the edge of an irregular, shallow hollow. The landscape had been misread. The depression shaped the reading; the wall confirmed it, but not in the way anyone had anticipated.

There is something quietly instructive about this. Archaeological inventories are cumulative and imperfect, built up from desk research, aerial analysis, and fieldwork that does not always happen in the same decade. Eanty More is a small example of how a landscape feature can migrate through official records before anyone boots up and walks over to look at it. The site is not without interest, just not the kind that was originally supposed.