In Newtown, County Clare, a low rise in improved pasture marks the approximate location of what the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded as a circular enclosure, roughly twenty metres in diameter. By the time anyone went to look for it on the ground, in 1998, nothing remained to be seen. No earthwork, no trace of a bank or ditch, no scatter of stone. The map says something was there; the field says otherwise.

The 1840 Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland was a remarkably thorough exercise, and the surveyors who produced the six-inch sheets were generally careful to distinguish between features they observed and those they inferred. An enclosure of this size, had it survived intact, might have been a ringfort, the most common early medieval settlement form in Ireland, typically consisting of a circular bank and ditch enclosing a farmstead. Tens of thousands were recorded across the country, and a great many have since been lost to agricultural improvement, exactly the kind of activity implied by the phrase "improved pasture." The levelling of earthworks to make fields more workable was commonplace in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a low, modest enclosure on a gentle rise would have presented little obstacle to a determined farmer with a plough or a scraper.