Look closer, as the Kilkenny historian William Carrigan did in 1905, and the bank turns out to conceal something stranger: a solidly built stone wall, about one and a half metres thick, encased on both sides by heaped earth. Through the eastern side runs a round-headed archway, its sides tapering inward in a pronounced inclination, standing just over two metres to its apex and wide enough to walk through comfortably. Carrigan considered it probably one of the oldest arches of its kind in Ireland. At the centre of the enclosure, he found the low foundations of a small building, oriented east to west, measuring only about nine metres by four and a half. Beside those foundations lay a single grave, that of a Mr Ryan of Kilferagh House. When Carrigan asked local people about the place, they had no name for it and no memory of it ever being used as a burial ground.

The site sits in the townland of Kilferagh, with St Fiachra's church and graveyard lying roughly two hundred and ninety metres to the east, and the medieval church at Sheastown a little over five hundred metres to the south-east across the townland boundary. The first Ordnance Survey mapping of the area, carried out in 1839 to 1840, shows the enclosure clearly, with trees planted inside it. By the time of the 1945 to 1946 revision, it appears as a tree-ring, a circular plantation used as a landscape ornament, common on the designed demesnes of Irish country houses. Kilfera House lies roughly four hundred and sixty metres to the north-east. What Carrigan interpreted as an ancient caiseal, the Irish term for a stone-walled enclosure of early medieval type, may in fact be a much later construction, the mortared walling pointing to a relatively recent date. The round-headed arch, with its shaped imposts, may have been lifted from St Fiachra's nearby and reset here as a deliberate antiquarian gesture, a folly in the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century tradition of borrowing genuine old stonework to lend atmosphere to a pleasure ground. The small interior foundations, rather than those of an early church, may belong to a garden building associated with the same scheme.

What makes the place genuinely difficult to read is that the enclosure itself may be older than any of this, pre-dating its incorporation into the designed landscape and its life as a tree-ring. The earthwork could carry a real antiquity that the later embellishments simultaneously preserved and obscured. The nineteenth-century map already shows it as a fixed feature in the field; a farm trackway skirts its north-western side, and a field boundary runs up to its south-eastern edge, one that by the mid-twentieth century had been absorbed into the enclosure's eastern wall, giving that side a noticeably straight appearance. Whether the arch is a folly or a survival, and whether anyone ever worshipped or was buried inside in any number greater than one, the enclosure has shed whatever name it once carried. Local memory, when Carrigan asked, was already blank.