That is, in a sense, the whole point. Somewhere beneath a patch of ordinary grazing land in County Mayo, a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across has effectively vanished, surviving only as a ghost on paper. It appears clearly on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the great early efforts to systematically record the Irish landscape, but by the time later editions were drawn up it had already been dropped. At ground level today there is no visible surface trace whatsoever.

The site sits on a slight rise in an otherwise low-lying and poorly drained stretch of countryside, with a stream or drain running along its north-western edge. That modest elevation may well have been the point: in a waterlogged landscape, even a small natural prominence offered drier, more workable ground. The enclosure itself was embanked, meaning it was defined by a raised earthen bank rather than a wall or ditch, a form commonly associated in Ireland with settlement or agricultural use across a broad sweep of prehistory and the early medieval period. Whether this particular example was a farmstead enclosure, a livestock pound, or something else entirely is impossible to say now. A field fence running north-west to south-east may actually overlie the south-western edge of the site, which would help explain why the bank has been so thoroughly absorbed into the working landscape that it leaves no impression underfoot.