This one in County Clare announces itself with almost nothing at all. On a south-facing slope of what was once marshy ground, now cleared and drained into pasture, there is, by most accounts, no visible surface trace of an enclosure whatsoever. And yet it remains officially listed, a placeholder in the record for something that was once considered significant enough to name.

The site owes its persistence largely to Thomas Johnson Westropp, the prolific late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century antiquarian who documented an extraordinary number of Clare's monuments, many of which might otherwise have gone unrecorded. On a copy of an 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, he marked the location and named it "Cahermackaleer Site", a name that gestures towards a caher, the Irish term for a stone-walled enclosure or ringfort. By the time the monument was formally listed in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, that name had shifted slightly to Cahermackateer. When the site was physically inspected in May 1999, nothing remained above ground to confirm its existence. The closest thing to corroboration came over a decade later, when aerial imagery from January 2011 revealed a vague outline on the ground, the kind of ghostly mark that cropmarks and soil differences sometimes leave behind, which may or may not correspond to the original enclosure Westropp identified.