On a south-east-facing slope outside Kilshenane, what was once a substantial circular earthwork enclosure has been reduced by time and agricultural activity to the point where no surface trace of it is now visible to the eye. You would walk straight across it without knowing.

The story of how it disappeared can be read, in reverse, through the layers of Ordnance Survey mapping. The earliest six-inch OS maps show a nearly complete circular enclosure, its bank surviving from west around through north and east to south, with only a relatively small section on the south-west destroyed. By the time the later edition was produced, that same enclosure had been reduced to a semi-circular earthwork with an approximate chord of 47 metres along the north-west to south-east axis, defined by a bank running from north through east to south and destroyed on every other side. Now even that remnant is gone from the ground, surviving only in the cartographic record. The field also holds the ghostly traces of many levelled boundary walls, suggesting a whole pattern of earlier land use has been smoothed away over generations. Eighty-eight metres to the north-west, grass-covered wall footings mark the outline of a possible rectangular building, its interior measuring roughly eleven by eight metres. The local landowner knows this field simply as the Church Field, a name that carries its own quiet weight given that a well recorded on the 1903 OS map as Killeen Well lies in an adjoining field just 240 metres to the south. A killeen, in Irish tradition, was a small unconsecrated burial ground, often used for unbaptised infants, and the pairing of such a name with a field locally remembered as a church site suggests an older ecclesiastical or devotional landscape lying just beneath the surface of this ordinary-looking pasture.