Stand in the tillage field just off the crest of the ridge in County Tipperary and the ground gives nothing away, no earthwork, no raised bank, no depression, no scatter of stone. The enclosure that once occupied this gentle east-facing slope has been so thoroughly absorbed into the agricultural landscape that it went unrecorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of both 1840 and 1906. It took an aircraft and a dry summer to bring it back.

In July 1970, a Cambridge University Committee for Aerial Photography flight captured a circular cropmark roughly 37 metres in diameter in the field. Cropmarks of this kind form when buried features, in this case a fosse, or enclosing ditch, alter the moisture and nutrient content of the soil above them, causing the growing crop to respond differently, appearing darker or more lush in dry conditions when viewed from altitude. The circular pattern identified here traces the outline of a former enclosure, the kind of roughly circular ditched settlement that appears throughout the Irish countryside and is broadly associated with the early medieval period, though enclosures of this form were used across a wide span of prehistory too. More telling is a gap in the fosse visible in the south-east quadrant, which may represent a causewayed entrance, a point where the ditch was deliberately left uncut to allow access. A farmyard that once stood 20 to 30 metres to the north has since been largely demolished, and the land to the south drops away fairly steeply toward a stream about 70 metres off. Another enclosure sits some 400 metres to the south-south-east, suggesting this part of Tipperary was once rather more populated than its present quietness implies.