At Pullagh in County Clare, a structure marked on the 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map and formally listed as an enclosure in Ireland's Record of Monuments and Places in 1996 was, on closer inspection, something far more mundane. When the site was examined in 1997, what investigators found was a single drystone wall of modern construction, partially collapsed and swallowed by dense hazel scrub growing across level, outcropping limestone rock.

The case is a small but instructive one. Enclosures in the Irish archaeological record can mean many things, from early medieval cashels, which are stone-walled ringforts, to prehistoric field boundaries or monastic enclosures. The category is broad enough that even a relatively recent field wall can, under the right conditions of age, abandonment, and overgrowth, take on the visual character of something older. At Pullagh, the combination of rough karst terrain, dense scrub, and a collapsing wall was apparently sufficient to generate a listing that a site visit then quietly deflated. The hazel woodland of the Burren region is well known for reclaiming cleared ground with considerable speed, and a forgotten wall in such an environment can become difficult to read at a glance.