At Cooleagh in County Tipperary, a linear earthwork once ran roughly north to south across a gently south-facing slope, traced on the first edition OS six-inch map of 1840 and still recorded on the 1903 to 1904 edition. By the time anyone thought to formally note it, the field had already been reclaimed for pasture, and the earthwork had vanished from the ground entirely.

What made the feature especially interesting was where it led. The trackway, if that is what it was, a hollow way worn into the earth by repeated passage of people or animals over time, ran directly up to the outer bank and fosse of a concentric enclosure situated to the north-east. A concentric enclosure is exactly what it sounds like: a series of roughly circular or oval banks and ditches arranged one inside another, a form associated in Ireland with enclosed settlement or, in some cases, with ceremonial use. That the trackway aligned with the southern quadrant of this enclosure suggests a deliberate connection between the two, a worn path to a specific entrance point, perhaps. A second linear earthwork runs east to west immediately south-west of the same enclosure, and a further enclosure and earthwork sit roughly a hundred metres to the north, suggesting the whole area once held a more complex arrangement of boundaries, routes, and enclosed spaces than the present pastoral fields would ever suggest.

None of this is visible today. The reclamation of the field has erased what the Victorian surveyors recorded twice over, leaving only the map evidence and the surrounding earthworks to hint at what the landscape once organised around itself.