Somewhere in the improved pasture of Watergrange, Co. Kildare, there is an enclosure that has managed the unusual feat of disappearing twice. It was absent from the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map in 1838, suggesting it had not yet been recorded or had already faded from obvious visibility. By the 1939 edition, however, it appeared as a dashed line tracing a semi-circular form, roughly 35 metres across on its northeast-to-southwest axis, sitting on the southeastern side of a field boundary on a gently westward-facing slope.

Enclosures of this kind, typically circular or near-circular boundaries defined by an earthen bank and sometimes a ditch, are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, often associated with early medieval settlement. What makes this one notable is less what it was than what became of it. When the site was visited in 1987, the field boundary that had helped define it on the map had been levelled, and no surface trace of the enclosure itself remained visible to the southeast. The dashed line on the 1939 map, already a cartographic admission of uncertainty, turned out to mark something that was already well on its way to erasure. Agricultural improvement of the surrounding pasture had done the rest.