Somewhere beneath the cultivated soil of Oldcourt in County Cork, the remains of a circular enclosure lie completely levelled, with no surface trace remaining. It survives only as a cartographic ghost, recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 as a circular area roughly twenty metres in diameter. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape; they are generally understood as the remains of enclosed farmsteads or settlement sites, sometimes dating back to the early medieval period, defined originally by an earthen bank and ditch. This one has been ploughed out of existence.

The 1842 map is the key document here. By the time the Ordnance Survey teams were moving through Cork in the early nineteenth century, many such features were already degraded, but this one was sufficiently visible to be captured, at least in outline. At approximately twenty metres across it would have been a modest enclosure, at the smaller end of the scale for this type of site. At some point after that survey, agricultural tillage did the rest, flattening whatever earthwork remained into the field. A second circular enclosure survives roughly three hundred metres to the west, which suggests this part of Oldcourt was once a more densely occupied or organised landscape than the bare fields now indicate.