Stand on the gentle south-facing slope just below the brow of a low hill and there is nothing to indicate that anything of archaeological note lies beneath your feet. No earthwork, no raised ring, no depression in the ground. The site is, as the record puts it with admirable plainness, not visible at ground level.

What we do know comes from an earlier era of mapping. The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most ambitious cartographic undertakings ever carried out in Ireland, recorded the enclosure using hachures, the small radiating lines that Victorian-era surveyors used to indicate earthworks and surface features. At that point, something was evidently still present and legible in the landscape, a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, typically interpreted as the remains of early medieval farmsteads or ring-forts, where a family and their livestock would have lived within a defined, usually ditched or embanked boundary. In the nearly two centuries since those surveyors passed through, whatever remained above ground has been levelled entirely, absorbed back into the hillside.