This one in Garraunanearla, on a gentle south-facing slope in County Tipperary, keeps its secrets entirely to itself. Stand in the pasture where it lies and you would see nothing at all. The circular enclosure exists, as far as ground-level experience is concerned, not in the present but only in a photograph.

The site was identified from an aerial photograph taken in 1970, in which the outline of a circular enclosure becomes legible as a cropmark or soilmark, the kind of subtle variation in vegetation or soil colour that only becomes visible from altitude and under the right conditions of light and season. Enclosures of this circular form are common across the Irish landscape in their various states of survival; many are the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that were the basic unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Whether this one belongs to that tradition or to some earlier or different use, the available evidence does not say. What the aerial record confirms is that something deliberate and circular was once laid out here, and that the land has since absorbed it almost entirely.