The enclosure at Lisnacreevy, in County Longford, offers none of that. Standing on the gentle rise where it was once marked, a visitor would see only pasture, a field boundary, a unremarkable stretch of moderately drained farmland. The monument has, by all accounts, vanished entirely from ground level, leaving behind something more like an absence than a ruin.

What we do know comes from cartographic evidence rather than excavation. The Grand Jury map of 1813 depicts the site as a circular enclosure, the kind of roughly ring-shaped earthwork, typically a raised bank and ditch surrounding a habitation or farmstead, that was built across Ireland from the early medieval period onward. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1914, no enclosure was marked, but a curving field boundary along the eastern side of the site may preserve the ghost of its outline, the landscape quietly retaining a curve that was once deliberately made. It is a common enough story in the Irish midlands, where centuries of ploughing, drainage, and land reorganisation have reduced hundreds of such monuments to faint traces readable only in old maps and aerial photographs.