This one in Magheranearla, on a south-east-facing slope in County Galway, offers almost nothing to the naked eye at ground level, yet it has not entirely disappeared. What was once a roughly D-shaped enclosure, some 31 metres across its longest axis with a notably straight north-western side stretching around 46 metres, now survives only as a faint rise in the ground and, more revealingly, as a shift in the colour of the grass above it. That kind of ghost, visible from the air but not from your feet, is one of the quieter ways the past refuses to go away completely.

The enclosure was recorded on the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which means it was a recognisable feature of the landscape during the first great systematic mapping of Ireland. By July 1984, when the site was physically inspected, almost nothing remained above ground. A later field boundary, running roughly north-north-east to south-south-west, had been cut through the eastern half of the enclosure at some point after its original construction, further disrupting whatever once defined it. The precise age and function of the enclosure are not recorded, but D-shaped enclosures of this kind are broadly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, where a curved bank and ditch would have enclosed a farmstead or small defended residence. Whether this one served such a purpose remains an open question. What resolved it back into visibility, at least partially, was aerial imagery captured in 2019, in which the outline of the old feature shows up as a distinct tonal difference in the vegetation, a phenomenon that occurs when buried features affect soil moisture and drainage, causing the grass above them to grow and colour slightly differently from the surrounding field.