At Fanygalvan in County Clare, a roughly oval enclosure sits at the foot of a south-facing slope on open karst land, the bare limestone terrain so characteristic of the Burren region. It was listed as a formal enclosure in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, the kind of designation that usually implies something old enough to warrant protection and study. When investigators actually visited the site in 1998, however, they found something altogether more ordinary: a modern enclosure, its perimeter formed by rough drystone walls standing about 1.4 metres high and measuring roughly 19 metres east to west and 22 metres north to south.

The site had first been flagged on an annotated map in 1994, passed along through personal correspondence rather than formal survey, which perhaps explains how it entered the record without closer scrutiny. Drystone walling, in which stones are stacked without mortar, has been a practical building method in limestone-rich areas of Ireland for centuries, and the technique itself offers few reliable clues about age. On the exposed karst of Clare, where field systems have been built, abandoned, and rebuilt across many generations, a well-made modern wall can look convincingly aged within a decade or two. The enclosure sits within a wider field system, which may have contributed to the initial assumption that it shared the same historical character as its surroundings.