The circular enclosure at Gullane, in north County Kerry, offers none of that. What remains is only a faint discolouration in the grass, a subtle shift in the way plants grow over soil that was once disturbed by human hands. Without knowing where to look, most people would walk straight past it.

The enclosure was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland and was still visible enough to be marked again on the revised 1914 to 1915 editions. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common field monuments in Ireland, typically interpreted as the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval farmers, with a bank and ditch defining a domestic space for a household and its livestock. At Gullane, that physical structure has since been levelled entirely, most likely through centuries of agricultural activity. What C. Toal documented in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey of 1995 was already a ghost of a site, identifiable only by that telltale variation in vegetation colour, the kind of mark that soil disturbance and buried features can leave on the surface for a surprisingly long time.