Walk across its south-facing pasture and you would find nothing underfoot to suggest the ground had ever been shaped by human hands. No bank rises, no ditch cuts the grass, no stonework interrupts the slope. And yet, from the air, the outline of something emerges, a ghostly oval pressed into the soil and readable only as a cropmark, the kind of subtle discolouration that appears in dry summers when buried features affect how grass and grain grow above them.

What that cropmark traces is an enclosure roughly thirty metres east to west and thirty-eight metres north to south, its shape recorded on an Ordnance Survey map as far back as 1929, where it was drawn as an oval area bounded by an earthen bank. The site has been tentatively identified as a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built across Ireland throughout the early medieval period, typically between the sixth and tenth centuries. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths or liosanna depending on their construction, were the ordinary domestic settlements of farming families, their circular or oval banks marking out a protected yard around a house or cluster of buildings. Thousands survive as earthworks elsewhere in the country; here, the bank has been reduced entirely, leaving only its shadow in the chemistry of the soil.