At Laharan in County Cork, a south-facing pasture slope holds the ghost of a rectangular enclosure that no longer leaves any mark on the ground. The surrounding field fences have gone too, so the landscape offers no frame of reference, no echo of the boundary that once defined this modest patch of ground.

The enclosure is known only because it was captured on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which recorded it as a roughly rectangular feature measuring approximately 35 metres on its northwest to southeast axis and around 25 metres across. Enclosures of this kind, broadly defined, served a wide range of purposes in the Irish countryside, from the secular to the ceremonial, and without surface remains or excavation it is impossible to say what this one was for or when it was built. By the time anyone thought to note it formally, it had already been levelled, its boundaries merged into the agricultural landscape around it.