This one, in the gently rolling grassland of Brownstown in County Westmeath, barely whispers. What was once a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that tens of thousands of early medieval Irish families called home, has been levelled so thoroughly that it is now most clearly visible not to someone standing in a field, but to a camera mounted on a satellite. A Digital Globe aerial photograph taken in November 2011 caught it as a faint crop mark, the kind of ghostly outline that appears when buried earthworks alter the moisture and nutrient content of the soil above them, causing the grass or tillage overhead to grow at a slightly different rate or colour.

The site takes the form of a sub-circular enclosure, roughly 29 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west, originally defined by an earthen bank and a shallow external fosse, the term for the ditch dug just outside such a bank. Both features are now very poorly preserved. Inside the enclosure, the ground slopes from east to west, and traces of cultivation ridges run northwest to southeast, suggesting that at some point after the ringfort fell out of use the interior was turned over to farming, a process that would have contributed significantly to the flattening of whatever earthworks remained. The fort sits on the south-eastern face of a slight natural rise, with higher ground overlooking it to the east and south-east, though it commands decent views across the surrounding landscape to the south, west, and north-east. A second ringfort lies approximately 100 metres to the north-east, a reminder that these enclosures were rarely truly isolated; early medieval settlement in Ireland tended to cluster, with neighbouring farmsteads often within easy sight of one another.