That kind of cartographic slip is more common in Irish archaeology than one might expect, but this particular case in Sroughan, County Wicklow has a pleasingly documented paper trail of the error and its eventual correction.

The site first entered the record in 1986, when it was listed as an enclosure in the Sites and Monuments Record, classified on the basis of aerial photographic evidence from 1973. An enclosure, in this context, is a broad term for any roughly circular or oval area defined by a bank, ditch, or other boundary, often of prehistoric or early medieval date, though not always. The problem was that when the site was plotted onto the published Record of Monuments and Places map for County Wicklow, it landed in the wrong field. A field visit in 1989 went to that incorrect location and found nothing more than an irregular, rock-strewn patch of ground with no archaeological significance. The matter might have ended there, written off as a phantom site, except that an Air Corps aerial photograph taken as far back as 1939 clearly shows the enclosure sitting in the field to the south-east of where the map had placed it. Later aerial photography, including imagery from the Ordnance Survey Ireland and Digital Globe, confirmed the same detail: a curving line of hedgerow or bushes following what appears to be the eastern enclosing element of the feature, still visible from above, still quietly holding its shape in the landscape while the paperwork pointed elsewhere.