The enclosure recorded in the townland of Raheen, in the barony of Coshma in County Limerick, belongs firmly to that last category. By the time anyone thought to look for it on the ground, it had already ceased to exist as a physical feature. What remains of it is essentially a single aerial photograph, a cropmark, and a record number in a national database.

The site came to light during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, when a flight over low-lying wet pasture captured a semicircular cropmark open to the north-north-east. Cropmarks appear when buried features, walls, ditches, or banks, affect the growth of crops or grass above them, often showing most clearly during dry spells when differential moisture retention makes the pattern visible from altitude. The survey image, catalogued as Bruff 281 (AP 4/3601), is the sole record of the enclosure's shape. It does not appear on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic mapping, which suggests it had already been levelled before the systematic mapping of the nineteenth century, or was simply never prominent enough to be recorded. Three associated habitation sites lie roughly 170 metres to the south-west, hinting that this enclosure may once have formed part of a small cluster of early settlement activity, though the relationship between them remains unestablished. The site sits approximately 20 metres north of the townland boundary with Rockbarton, on ground cut through by land drains and watercourses.

There is nothing to see here in any conventional sense. Orthoimagery taken between 2005 and 2012 by Ordnance Survey Ireland, and again by Digital Globe between 2011 and 2013, shows no trace of the monument. A Google Earth image from September 2020 confirms the same. The pasture has absorbed it entirely. For anyone with an interest in how archaeological knowledge is actually assembled, though, the Raheen enclosure is a useful illustration: a place that exists now only in a 1986 aerial photograph, a grid reference, and the careful work of compilers Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly, who uploaded its record in November 2020.