On a steep south-westerly facing slope above a stream valley in Newtown, County Wicklow, a circular enclosure was recorded on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map, the great nineteenth-century mapping project that documented Ireland's landscape in remarkable detail. Yet when someone actually went to look, there was nothing to see at ground level.

Circular enclosures of this kind are common enough across the Irish countryside, often the remains of ringforts, which were enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They survive in thousands across the country, sometimes as earthen banks and ditches, sometimes as barely perceptible rises in a field. The Ordnance Survey mapmakers of the first edition, working largely in the 1830s and 1840s, recorded many such features that were more legible then than now, before decades of agriculture, drainage, and land improvement wore them further into the earth. Whether this particular enclosure was a genuine settlement site, a natural feature mistaken for one, or simply something that has since been ploughed or eroded entirely out of existence is not known.