It is the kind of detail that catches the eye on old maps, a quiet annotation of something ancient. The trouble is that if you were to go looking for it today, there would be nothing to find.

The enclosure was a ringfort, the most common monument type in the Irish landscape. Ringforts, which are typically circular areas enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, were built predominantly during the early medieval period and served as farmsteads for families of varying social rank. Thousands survive across the country, but thousands more do not. The Crumlin example was levelled during land reclamation works in the mid-1960s, a fate shared by a great many such sites during that era, when agricultural improvement schemes reshaped large areas of the Irish countryside. No visible surface trace remains. The 1932 map, then, is among the last records of its physical form, preserving the outline of a place that had probably been in use well over a thousand years before the surveyor noted it down.