That, in a way, is precisely what makes it interesting. Somewhere beneath a ploughed field on a south-westerly facing slope in County Tipperary, a circular enclosure lies entirely invisible at ground level, its presence known only because of what a camera captured from the air in July 1970.

Cropmarks appear when buried features, ditches, walls, or earthworks, affect how vegetation above them grows. In dry summers especially, crops over a filled-in ditch tend to stay greener longer, drawing moisture from deeper soil, while those over a buried wall thin and yellow earlier. The result, from altitude, is a faint but legible outline of whatever once stood or was dug into the ground below. The 1970 aerial photograph that revealed the Monksgrange enclosure also picked out two further circular features nearby, one approximately 70 metres to the north-west and another roughly 120 metres to the south-west. Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland and often represent the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1000 AD, though some are earlier. The clustering of three such features in relatively close proximity suggests this stretch of Tipperary may once have supported a small concentration of settlement, the details of which remain largely unexamined.