The oval enclosure at Scartana is, in the most literal sense, an absence; a place where something once stood and has since been erased, leaving only cartographic evidence and a patch of fallow ground to hint at what was there.

The first Ordnance Survey of Ireland, carried out in the 1830s and published at the six-inch scale in 1840, recorded the site as an oval, banked enclosure with trees growing inside it. Such enclosures, often referred to in Irish archaeology as ringforts or raths depending on their construction, were typically used as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, though some have earlier or later origins. By the time the second edition of the OS map was produced in 1906, the enclosure was still traceable, measuring roughly 35 metres north to south and 37 metres east to west, its earthen bank mostly intact and surrounded on several sides by the field boundaries of the working agricultural landscape around it. At some point after that second survey, the bank was levelled and the field boundaries to the north and south were removed along with it. Today there is no visible trace of the monument above ground. The only remaining clue is in the eastern quadrant, which has been left fallow and planted with young trees along its straight edges, a quiet geometric anomaly in an otherwise unremarkable tillage field on a northwest-facing hillside.