At Lissylisheen in County Clare, a circular enclosure marked with confident cartographic authority on a 1916 Ordnance Survey map was, when someone finally went to look at it properly, almost certainly built in modern times. The site sits at the northern edge of a south-west to north-east valley, tucked within a hazel wood, and consists of a roughly circular area about twenty metres across, bounded by a drystone wall approximately one metre high. Drystone construction, in which stones are laid without mortar and rely on careful placement for their stability, is a technique used across many centuries in Ireland, which makes dating by appearance alone notoriously unreliable. Here, though, inspection in 1999 suggested the wall is of recent rather than prehistoric origin.

The enclosure had been listed as a protected monument in both the Sites and Monuments Record of 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, carrying the quiet authority that such designations confer. The 1916 map gave it a solid outline, the standard symbol for a feature considered sufficiently established to record. It is a small illustration of how archaeological inventories are compiled: field surveyors work partly from earlier maps, oral tradition, and place-name evidence, and a feature can accumulate official status before anyone has had a close look at the stonework. When that inspection came, the enclosure turned out to be something rather more ordinary, perhaps a field boundary, a small enclosure for animals, or simply a structure whose original purpose has gone unrecorded. The site remains listed, a minor anomaly in the Clare landscape, neither ancient monument nor quite nothing.