Somewhere beneath the current fields, or dissolved entirely into the soil, lies the ghost of an enclosure that was already old when the first Ordnance Survey cartographers passed through in 1839 and 1840. They recorded it on their six-inch map: a roughly square earthwork, around 40 metres across in both directions, sitting quietly in the landscape with a field boundary running along its western edge. That boundary, notably, appears to have kinked outward rather than cutting straight through, suggesting that whoever laid it out recognised the enclosure as something worth skirting around.

Enclosures of this kind, typically earthen banks or ditches forming a defined perimeter, appear throughout the Irish countryside in various forms and from various periods. Some are associated with early medieval settlement, others with prehistoric activity, and without excavation it is rarely possible to be certain which. What can be said about the Furzehouse example is that it survived long enough to be mapped, and then did not survive much longer. When the six-inch map was revised between 1945 and 1946, the enclosure had disappeared from the record entirely, implying it was levelled at some point in the intervening century. Modern satellite imagery confirms there is no visible trace remaining above ground.

What the kinked field boundary represents, then, is a small act of deference that outlasted the monument it was deferring to. For a period of decades or centuries, the enclosure shaped the landscape around it even as the landscape slowly closed in. Now the kink, if it still exists, would be the only legible sign that something was once considered worth going around.