In Kiltacky More, a townland in County Clare, there sits a roughly circular enclosure about twenty metres across, ringed by a drystone wall half a metre to just under a metre wide. On paper it sounded like the real thing: enclosures of similar dimensions are often the remains of ringforts, the circular earthen or stone-walled farmsteads that dot the Irish countryside in their thousands, mostly dating from the early medieval period between roughly 500 and 1200 AD.

When the site was first catalogued in the early 1990s, it was logged as an enclosure in both the Sites and Monuments Record and the Record of Monuments and Places, the official registers used to identify and protect features of potential archaeological significance. When someone actually went out to look at it in 1999, the picture became more complicated. The wall defining the subcircular shape turned out to be modern drystone construction, the kind of field boundary that farmers have been building and rebuilding across Clare for centuries using whatever loose stone came to hand. Dense hazel scrub surrounds it on fairly level ground, which may well have obscured its character from earlier cartographic or desk-based assessments. Whether an older feature underlies it or once occupied the same ground is not recorded.