This one in Reafadda, a townland in the uplands of County Tipperary, offers nothing so obliging. On a poorly drained, west-facing slope, with a ravine cutting across the ground immediately to the north, there is no trace of anything visible at ground level. The enclosure exists, as far as the eye is concerned, only as an idea.

What confirmed it was a photograph taken from the air on 16 April 1974, part of a Geological Survey of Ireland series. In the image, the outline of a circular enclosure became legible in a way that walking the field never could have revealed. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common monument types in the Irish landscape, typically the remains of a ringfort or rath, a farmstead enclosed by an earthen bank and sometimes a ditch, most often dating to the early medieval period. Over centuries, ploughing, drainage work, and simple weathering can reduce such structures until their ditches and banks are entirely absorbed back into the soil, leaving only a faint difference in how crops grow or how moisture collects, differences invisible to a person standing among them but readable from altitude in the right conditions. A second enclosure sits to the north-east of this one, suggesting this upland area saw repeated or sustained use, though what relationship the two sites had to one another, and when, remains unknown.