In a flat stretch of tillage land near Courttown in County Kildare, the ground holds traces of something long gone, readable only from the air. What appears on an aerial photograph as a ghostly outline, a cropmark caused by the differential growth of crops over buried or levelled features, resolves into the shape of a narrow fosse, the term for a ditch or moat, enclosing a sub-rectangular or oval area. At ground level, the only sign anything is there at all is a very slight depression, roughly 27 metres north to south and 11 metres east to west, dropping no more than 10 centimetres below the surrounding field. It is, in practical terms, almost invisible.

This enclosure is one of many. Aerial photographic surveys, drawing on sources including the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photographs and work carried out by Dr. Gillian Barrett, have identified a dense concentration of cropmarks across this part of Kildare. The majority fall within a roughly rectangular block of land, approximately 650 metres east to west and 350 metres north to south, with several further sites scattered a couple of hundred metres beyond that core area. What these cropmarks collectively represent is a landscape that was once considerably busier with human activity than its current emptiness suggests, a patchwork of levelled and ploughed-out monuments whose original purposes, dates, and relationships to one another remain, for the most part, unresolved. The enclosure itself, narrow-ditched and modest in scale, could belong to any number of periods and uses, from an early medieval farmstead boundary to something considerably older.