What we know of it comes almost entirely from the air. In September 1984, aerial reconnaissance over the area around Cloonmore picked out a cluster of rectangular house foundations and old field boundaries spread across a roughly oblong patch of ground, approximately 300 metres along its longer axis and 130 metres across. That kind of patterning, foundations and enclosures visible only as crop marks or soil shadows from altitude, is often the clearest evidence left of settlements that were abandoned and slowly absorbed back into farmland.

What gives the site a particular edge of melancholy is what the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map adds to the picture. Those maps, produced in Ireland during the mid-nineteenth century, recorded buildings as either roofed or unroofed, a distinction that carried real weight in a country then convulsed by famine and mass emigration. At the time of the survey, five roofed rectangular buildings stood in this area, meaning the settlement was at least partly inhabited. Sometime between that survey and the present, the roofs came off, the walls fell, and the place ceased to function as a community. The aerial photograph caught the outline of what remained: the geometry of lives organised around fields and houses, pressed faintly into the ground west of the Clare river.