Others exist only as rumours in the soil, visible from the air for a single season and then gone again, leaving no trace on any map. The enclosure recorded at Cross in the barony of Coonagh, County Limerick, belongs firmly to the second category. It never appeared on Ordnance Survey historic mapping, and when researchers checked Google Earth imagery taken in November 2018, along with Digital Globe orthophotos from 2011 to 2013, there was nothing to see. The site exists, essentially, as a moment caught from altitude, decades ago.

What we know comes almost entirely from one source: the Bruff aerial photographic survey of 1986, which captured this stretch of south Limerick farmland and logged a semi-circular shaped area in pasture, sitting on a slight rise in the ground. Aerial photography of this kind works by revealing cropmarks or soilmarks, the subtle differences in how vegetation grows over buried features that become legible when seen from above under the right light and dry conditions. The record, compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the national monuments database in July 2020, catalogues the site under reference AP4/3676, frame Bruff 105. The enclosure, an enclosed area likely defined originally by a bank, ditch, or both, forms part of a broader cluster of monuments in the immediate area. Three barrows, which are prehistoric burial mounds, along with a separate enclosure and an earthwork, lie approximately 170 metres to the northwest, suggesting this corner of Coonagh barony was a place of some significance over a long period.

For anyone curious enough to visit, the site lies in what is now ordinary agricultural pasture, and there is nothing on the ground surface to distinguish it from the surrounding fields. The semi-circular form that showed up in 1986 has not reappeared in subsequent satellite imagery, which means conditions in that particular year were unusually favourable, the kind of dry spell that stresses crops over hollow or disturbed ground and briefly makes the buried past legible. The related monuments to the northwest are separately recorded and may offer more visible context in the landscape. Access to any of these sites should be arranged with the relevant landowner, and the terrain, low-lying improved pasture on a gentle rise, presents no particular difficulty underfoot.