That is, in a sense, precisely the point. Somewhere on a west-facing slope in County Cork, beneath ordinary pasture, lies the ghost of a circular enclosure roughly twenty-five metres across, its outline surviving only in the ink of a nineteenth-century map and the imagination of anyone who happens to know to look.

The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the feature as a circular area marked by a dotted line, the cartographers' conventional way of indicating something earthen or otherwise low-lying rather than a standing wall or ditch. Enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland and are often associated with early medieval settlement, the circular form being characteristic of ringforts, which were typically enclosed farmsteads built between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. Whether this particular enclosure was a ringfort, a field boundary of some other period, or something else entirely, the map alone cannot say. What it does confirm is that by 1842 the feature was considered notable enough to mark, and that at some point since, it was levelled entirely, leaving no visible surface trace in the grass above it.