In the undulating pastureland around Farneybridge in County Tipperary, a cluster of earthworks came to light not through excavation or fieldwork but through a single aerial photograph taken in 1973. What the camera captured, the ground conceals almost completely: a series of enclosures arranged around a ringfort known as Ballyvesta Fort, none of them marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps that have long served as a baseline record for Irish field monuments.

The photograph revealed several distinct features. To the south-west of Ballyvesta Fort lay a circular and a rectangular enclosure, and to the south-east a roughly rectangular enclosure with a circular one adjoined to it. On the ground today, the roughly rectangular enclosure to the south-east survives only as a narrow trench or dip in the soil, visible mainly as a line of darker grass, the kind of crop or vegetation mark that aerial photography picks out with particular clarity. The western side of that enclosure followed a field boundary that has since been levelled entirely. The adjoining circular enclosure has left no trace whatsoever at ground level. A ringfort, for context, is a circular earthen or stone enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period, that served as a farmstead or settlement. The proximity of these surrounding enclosures to Ballyvesta Fort raises the possibility that they were in use at the same time, perhaps as ancillary fields or compounds associated with whoever farmed and lived within the ringfort itself.