At Pullagh in County Clare, what was once catalogued as an enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that can indicate an early medieval farmstead or a prehistoric ritual site, was investigated in 1997 and found to be something considerably more recent: an ordinary field, bounded by a drystone wall of modern construction. The drystone technique itself is ancient enough, stones stacked without mortar in a tradition stretching back millennia across Ireland, but the wall at Pullagh carries no such antiquity.

The sequence of events is a small study in how archaeology can be complicated by cartography. The site had been identified from the Ordnance Survey first edition six-inch map, the landmark survey of Ireland carried out in the nineteenth century, and duly listed in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. On paper, the shape was convincing enough. On the ground, a year later, it resolved into nothing older than a farmer's field boundary. It was quietly noted and left in the record as what it is.