At Taghadoe in County Kildare, the most significant archaeology may be the kind you cannot see at all. A curving earthen bank and a shallow external fosse, a ditch running alongside a boundary to channel water or mark a perimeter, were recorded here in 1985, traceable for roughly 200 metres running northward from the western end of the graveyard. Even then it was slight, the bank no more than a low rise in the ground, the fosse barely 0.4 metres deep and two metres wide. Today that feature has vanished from the surface entirely, absorbed back into the field.

What survives, in a different sense, is what lies beneath. Geophysical survey work carried out by M. Byrne for an unpublished NUI Maynooth thesis in 2005 detected subsurface traces of what may be a second, inner enclosure, sitting roughly 65 metres north of the site's round tower, one of those slender, tapering stone towers built by early Irish monastic communities from around the tenth century onwards, typically used as bell towers and places of refuge. The feature shows up as a gently curving line running approximately 60 metres east to west, and it lies in the field recorded as "Glebe" on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1838. A glebe was land set aside for the use of a parish clergyman, and its presence here hints at the long continuity of ecclesiastical function on this ground. The possibility of concentric enclosures, an outer boundary now gone and an inner one still legible underground, is consistent with the layout of early Irish monastic sites, where nested enclosures often defined zones of increasing sanctity moving toward a central church or oratory.

Nothing of this is readable to the casual eye on a visit to Taghadoe today. The round tower still stands, and the graveyard remains in use, but the enclosures that once gave the site its shape survive only as a faint electronic signature in a geophysical plot, and a set of measurements recorded before the last traces disappeared from view.