No earthwork, no ditch, no raised outline interrupts the grass. The site exists now almost entirely as a cartographic memory, preserved in two maps made decades apart, each of which recorded something that was already, in different ways, disappearing.

The earlier of those records is the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the most ambitious geographical projects ever undertaken in Ireland, which captured the enclosure as circular in plan. By the time surveyors returned and produced the larger-scale 1:2500 plan, drawn up between 1912 and 1916, the same feature was recorded as roughly subrectangular, measuring around ten metres on a northwest to southeast axis. Whether the shape had genuinely changed through agricultural disturbance in the intervening decades, or whether the two surveys simply caught different aspects of a complex and already degraded earthwork, is impossible now to say. Enclosures of this general type, which in an Irish context usually denote a ringfort or similar early medieval settlement boundary, were commonly built from earthen banks and ditches that are particularly vulnerable to repeated ploughing and land improvement. The process of reclaiming boggy or marginal ground for pasture, which reshaped large areas of the west of Ireland across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would have been more than sufficient to erase a low earthwork entirely.

What remains is the fact of the discrepancy, the ten-metre measurement, and the knowledge that something was here on that slope, recognised twice by people with instruments and notebooks, and then swallowed by the field.