Somewhere in the reclaimed farmland of this part of County Galway, an enclosure once stood that has since been absorbed so completely into the working landscape that it leaves no visible trace on the ground whatsoever. What survives instead is a paper ghost: two maps, made roughly eighty years apart, each showing something slightly different, and together telling a small story of change and eventual erasure.

The earlier of the two records is the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which marks a roughly rectangular hachured enclosure on this spot, measuring approximately 32 metres east to west and 21 metres north to south. Hachuring on early OS maps typically indicates raised or embanked features, suggesting the enclosure had some physical presence above the surrounding ground level at the time of survey. By the 1921 edition, the picture had shifted: the enclosure is shown as roughly subcircular rather than rectangular, defined by a wall and planted with trees. Whether the shape changed, or whether earlier surveyors simply recorded it with less precision, is impossible to say. What is clear is that within the span of those two surveys, someone saw fit to plant trees within or around it, giving the feature a new kind of legibility on the landscape, even as its original purpose remained unrecorded. After 1921, it disappears entirely, swallowed by the farmland around it.