By the time anyone looked for it on the ground in 1985, there was nothing to see, only pasture on level terrain, the kind of unremarkable field that draws no particular attention.

The enclosure appears on the second edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1897 to 1898, which is itself a useful indicator of how recently some features were still legible in the landscape. Circular earthen enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, typically the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built predominantly between the early medieval period and around the twelfth century. They survive in varying states of preservation, and many have been levelled by centuries of ploughing, drainage works, or land improvement schemes. What is slightly unusual here is not the disappearance itself, which is common enough, but the fact that the cartographic evidence pins down when the feature was still recognisable as a coherent form, and the field survey pins down, within decades, when it had ceased to be. Between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth, something erased it entirely.