This one in Shanaclogh, in the barony of Pubblebrien in County Limerick, offers nothing so obliging. It exists, in any meaningful sense, only as a circular shadow in a single set of aerial photographs, a cropmark pressed briefly into visibility by the conditions of one November day in 1984, and never clearly seen again since.

Cropmarks form when buried structures affect the moisture and nutrients available to the plants growing above them. The outlines of old walls or ditches can produce subtle but readable differences in vegetation colour or growth, particularly when viewed from the air at the right moment. In this case, photographs taken on 3 November 1984 during survey work associated with a Bord Gáis pipeline revealed a circular-shaped cropmark in pasture on a south-west-facing slope, sitting within what appears to be an older field system. The circular form is characteristic of an enclosure, a broad category that includes ringforts, which were the enclosed farmsteads used by early medieval Irish families, as well as earlier prehistoric settlements. The Archaeological Survey of Ireland logged it accordingly, though no surface remains were found when the site was visited in 2000. Later orthoimage surveys, including Digital Globe imagery from 2011 to 2013 and a Google Earth image from February 2020, have failed to recover any trace of it. The record was compiled by Martin Fitzpatrick and uploaded in August 2020.

There is, practically speaking, nothing to see here in the conventional sense. The site sits in private agricultural pasture, and without the precise atmospheric and seasonal conditions that produced that 1984 cropmark, the ground gives nothing away. Its interest lies less in what can be visited and more in what it illustrates about how much of Ireland's past remains legible only through indirect means, a geometry of buried features that surfaces briefly, unpredictably, and then disappears again into the grass.