That uncertainty is not a failure of research; it is, in a sense, the whole story. A feature recorded from the air in 1986 has since been swallowed so thoroughly by landscape and time that no satellite image, no orthoimage survey, and no ground-level observation has been able to confirm it still exists, or indeed precisely where it sits.

The enclosure was identified during the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, catalogued as Bruff 73 at reference 4/3600, and recorded within the deer park of Rockbarton House in County Limerick. Deer parks were enclosed private landscapes, typically associated with later medieval and early modern estates, used to manage deer for hunting and display. Rockbarton House itself is a listed structure on the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, sitting roughly 370 metres to the east of the recorded location. The enclosure lies around 2.3 kilometres west-southwest of Lough Gur, one of the most archaeologically layered lake landscapes in Ireland, and about 350 metres southeast of a cashel at Cahirguillamore. A cashel is a stone-walled circular enclosure, typically of early medieval date, used to protect a farmstead or dwelling. The site does not appear on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic mapping, which suggests it was either never mapped or had already disappeared from the visible landscape before systematic surveying began. When the area labelled Bruff 73 on the Sites and Monuments Record map was examined more recently, what occupied that space was an ornamental pond and island, features that may have obscured or destroyed whatever the aerial photograph once captured.

For anyone curious enough to investigate, the exact location remains genuinely uncertain, and the site is not publicly accessible in any formal sense, sitting as it does within private estate grounds. The broader area around Lough Gur rewards archaeological interest, with numerous monuments recorded across the surrounding townlands. The enclosure at Rockbarton is most useful, perhaps, as a reminder of how archaeology works at its edges: a single aerial photograph, a reference number, a question that subsequent decades have not answered.