That gentle arc, sweeping from south-west to north-west across the western edge of a pasture field at Shanwar, is almost certainly a remnant of something much older, absorbed into the working landscape so gradually that the enclosure it once belonged to has all but ceased to exist.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded a circular enclosure here, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five metres in diameter, sitting on elevated ground above a view north-westward over rough hilly pasture and south-eastward toward Lough Muck, roughly 360 metres away. Circular enclosures of this kind are a common feature of the Irish early medieval landscape, used variously as enclosed farmsteads, as ringforts protecting a household and its animals, or sometimes for purposes that remain uncertain. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its maps in 1930, this one had vanished from the record entirely. On the ground, what remains is a low, roughly circular rise of between fifteen and twenty metres across, barely distinguishable from ordinary uneven pasture unless you are looking for it. The field wall that borders the western side of this rise preserves, in its curve, what was most likely the western arc of the original structure, now serving as an unremarkable boundary between one farmer's field and the next.