The enclosure at Tullowmacjames in north County Tipperary belongs firmly to this category. It once occupied a slight rise in gently rolling countryside, the kind of elevated position that early enclosures, whether used for settlement, agriculture, or ritual, were typically sited on to take advantage of drainage and visibility. Today, nothing of it can be seen at ground level.

The destruction took place in 1974, a decade that saw considerable loss of archaeological monuments across rural Ireland as land reclamation and agricultural intensification accelerated. The site is recorded in Stout's 1984 study and later in the Archaeological Inventory of County Tipperary, compiled by Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien. An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is broadly any defined area bounded by a bank, ditch, wall, or some combination of these, and such features appear throughout the Irish landscape in forms ranging from the prehistoric to the early medieval. What type this particular example represented, how old it was, or what purpose it served, is no longer determinable from what survives in the record.

What remains is essentially the fact of its absence. The slight rise in the undulating north Tipperary countryside is still there, but the earthwork that once marked it as a place of human significance has been erased. That gap between the landscape as it looks now and the landscape as it was recorded is, in its quiet way, its own kind of historical document.