At Killacloyne in County Cork, a subrectangular enclosure measuring roughly 40 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west was recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, yet nothing of it remains above ground today. No earthwork, no ridge in a field, no faint shadow after rainfall. Just the notation of something that was once there, now entirely levelled.

Enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, typically associated with early medieval settlement, though they can span a wide range of periods. They were often formed by a raised bank and ditch surrounding a farmstead or small community, and their subrectangular shape, somewhere between a rectangle and an oval, is a form frequently encountered across Munster. By the time the OS surveyors came through in the early nineteenth century and committed the feature to paper, the enclosure at Killacloyne was evidently already under pressure from agricultural reorganisation. A field fence running east to west cut directly across it, suggesting that the boundaries of working farmland had been redrawn without much regard for whatever had stood there before. At some point after 1842, whatever remained of the original earthwork was fully removed.