Go looking for it on the ground, however, and there is nothing to find. No earthwork, no ridge of soil, no faint depression in the grass. The site is, in practical terms, invisible.

A univallate enclosure, meaning one defined by a single bank or ditch, was one of the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its immediate surroundings. That such a feature could be recorded on Ordnance Survey mapping and then leave no surface trace is not especially unusual; centuries of agriculture, drainage work, and gradual erosion can level even substantial earthworks. What makes Gortacurraun quietly interesting is precisely that gap between the cartographic record and the landscape as it now exists. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a systematic study of the antiquities of the Corca Dhuibhne region, and at that point there was already nothing left to see above ground.