In a field of level pasture at Friarsgrange in County Tipperary, there is nothing to indicate that anything once stood here, no earthwork, no shadow in the grass, no depression in the soil. And yet the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records a circular enclosure on this very spot, its outline dutifully traced by cartographers who visited before it was gone.

The enclosure had already been levelled for at least twenty years before around 1980, most likely a casualty of land consolidation, the mid-twentieth-century process by which smaller, fragmented holdings were merged into larger, more efficient agricultural units. Hedgerows, ditches, and the old boundaries that once divided the fields immediately to the north and south of the site have also disappeared, suggesting a fairly thorough reworking of the landscape in that period. What the enclosure originally was is not recorded, but its circular form places it in the broad company of enclosed sites that range from prehistoric to early medieval in date, and a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across Ireland during the early medieval period, survives roughly 330 metres to the north-east, hinting that this corner of Tipperary was once a more densely settled place than it appears today. The name Friarsgrange itself carries its own historical weight, granting land of this kind was common practice among the monastic orders, and a grange was typically an outlying farm attached to a religious house.