At Ballyconry in County Clare, the feature that caught the attention of surveyors is something far more elemental: a grouping of field walls and enclosures, built without mortar, without dressed stone, and without any apparent ambition beyond the practical business of dividing land.

The walls are of single-walled drystone construction, a technique in which stones are stacked and wedged against one another so that the structure holds its own weight without binding material. When inspectors visited in 1997, they identified several distinct walls and enclosures across the site, and dated the complex to the period after AD 1700, placing it within the era of post-medieval agricultural reorganisation that reshaped so much of the Irish countryside. It is modest, functional work, the kind of labour that was repeated thousands of times across Clare and the wider west of Ireland as farming communities enclosed pasture and tillage ground. What makes this particular grouping notable is simply that it was recorded at all, first on the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again on the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, before a physical inspection confirmed what was actually there.