This one in Kilcommon, County Tipperary, offers no such courtesy. Situated near the summit of a gentle westward-facing slope, in what is now open pasture, the enclosure is entirely invisible at ground level. Its existence is known only because a camera mounted in an aircraft happened to pass overhead in 1974 and recorded something the grass had long since swallowed.

Aerial photography has been one of archaeology's most transformative tools, revealing crop marks and soil discolourations that betray buried features to a lens in a way they never would to a person walking the same ground. The 1974 photograph, taken as part of the Geological Survey of Ireland's aerial programme, caught what appears to be an enclosure, the general term for a defined area bounded by a ditch, bank, or wall, used across many centuries and for many purposes, from settlement to ritual to agricultural management. Intriguingly, a second possible enclosure site lies roughly twenty metres to the south-west, which raises the question of whether the two features are related, whether in date, function, or both. That question remains open. Without excavation, the buried geometry of Kilcommon keeps its own counsel.