That, in a sense, is what makes it worth knowing about. An oval earthwork enclosure, roughly 65 metres across its longest axis, once occupied this patch of County Kilkenny farmland, but by the summer of 1964 it had been levelled entirely. Walk the field today and there is no visible trace of it whatsoever. And yet the enclosure has not entirely disappeared; it simply requires the right conditions, and a view from above, to reveal itself.

The monument appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, recorded there as roughly circular, and on the 1947 revision it was mapped again, this time as oval. Sometime between that revision and July 1964, the earthwork was ploughed out. But the fosse, the ditch that once defined its boundary, had cut deeply enough into the subsoil that it continued to leave its mark on the land in a different way. A fosse of this kind, once filled with looser, moister material than the surrounding ground, will cause crops growing above it to develop at a different rate, producing colour and height variations across an otherwise uniform field. These are cropmarks, and they are among the principal tools archaeologists use to detect buried and destroyed sites from the air. Aerial photographs taken in July 1969 and again in 1971 captured the Rathclogh enclosure as a pronounced cropmark, its outline emerging clearly from the surrounding crop. More recently, satellite imagery has confirmed it is still readable in the landscape. What is also visible, clustered around this enclosure, is a broader pattern: at least five other cropmark enclosures lie within roughly 150 metres, dotted to the north, north-east, and east. Whatever activity drew people to this particular corner of Kilkenny in the past, it appears to have been concentrated and sustained rather than incidental.