What makes this feature at Monaraheen quietly interesting is precisely the uncertainty surrounding it: nobody is quite sure whether it is ancient at all, or whether what looks like a prehistoric enclosure was in fact a deliberate piece of nineteenth-century landscaping dressed up to resemble one.

The site sits on a gentle rise in softly undulating ground, the kind of modest elevation that both early farmers and later estate designers tended to favour, each for their own reasons. An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is simply a defined area set apart from its surroundings by a bank, ditch, or scarp, and such features were made in Ireland across a very long span of time, from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period. But the first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the 1830s and 1840s, records this particular circle in a way that raises the possibility it was already being treated as a landscape ornament rather than a working remnant. The tree-lined scarp, the clean circular plan, the complete absence of any visible entrance: these could point to genuine antiquity, or equally to the taste of a nineteenth-century landowner who wanted something that looked pleasingly old. The question remains open.