What makes them worth pausing over is precisely this elusiveness: the pair only reveal themselves clearly from the air, their conjoined rings visible in aerial photography where the ground itself offers little more than the slightest suggestion of earthen banks.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a common enough feature of the Irish landscape, remnants of enclosed spaces, probably ringforts or earlier pastoral boundaries, built from banked earth rather than stone and consequently far more vulnerable to the slow erasure of centuries of farming. What is less common is finding two such enclosures sharing a boundary in this way. The more southerly of the two sits on a gentle rise in what is now grazing land, and its paired companion lies immediately adjacent. Their relationship to one another, whether they were built at the same time, served the same function, or belonged to a single agricultural or domestic complex, remains an open question. The area around Ballinrobe, taking in the shorelines of Lough Mask and Lough Carra, was surveyed archaeologically in 1994, and it was through that work that this pair was recorded and catalogued.