That double omission is quietly telling. The nineteenth-century OS mapping programme was remarkably thorough in recording earthworks across the Irish landscape, and its surveyors documented thousands of ringforts, the circular enclosed farmsteads that represent the most common monument type surviving from early medieval Ireland. To slip past that net once is unremarkable; to remain unrecorded across nearly a century of mapping is a different matter.

The site came to light not through ground survey but through aerial photography, identified from the image reference ACP V203/79-80. Aerial reconnaissance has been responsible for revealing a considerable number of Irish monuments that left no obvious surface trace visible to someone walking the land, whether through crop marks in dry summers, soil discolouration, or subtle variations in vegetation growth that only become legible from altitude. In this case, the ringfort at Leekfield joined a long catalogue of sites whose existence was simply invisible until someone looked down.