Taken on 19 July 1967 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, a single frame over flat reclaimed pasture in Ballygriffin, County Tipperary appeared to show a cluster of earthworks suggestive of a former settlement, roughly 120 metres north of a medieval church and graveyard. It was the kind of image that prompts careful note-taking and cautious excitement.

When someone eventually walked the ground, the picture became considerably more modest. The roughly circular feature that had drawn attention turned out to be an old disused quarry. There are undulations running northward from it, and a couple of low banks trailing southward in the direction of the church and graveyard, but these are subtle enough that they resist any clear interpretation. No definable pattern emerges from them. The pasture here falls away gently towards the Multeen River valley to the west, and whatever shaped the ground, whether human activity, the quarry's own spoil, or simply the slow memory of worked land, it left nothing legible enough to confirm the settlement the photograph had seemed to promise.