The one at Coddstown Little in County Wexford offers no such courtesy. It survives not as a raised earthwork but as a cropmark, a ghostly outline that only becomes legible from the air, when variations in soil moisture cause the grass or grain above a buried ditch to ripen or wither at a different rate from the surrounding field. What emerges in those aerial photographs is a D-shaped enclosure, roughly 40 metres across from east to west and about 30 metres from north to south, traced by a single fosse, or ditch, that once defined the boundary of what would have been a farmstead of the early medieval period.

Ringforts, known in the Irish tradition as raths when defined by earthen banks rather than stone, were the dominant form of rural settlement in Ireland roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They ranged from modest single-family enclosures to the more elaborate multivallate sites associated with higher-status occupants. The Coddstown Little example appears to have been a relatively modest, single-ditched site. Its D-shape, rather than the more common circular plan, may reflect a practical accommodation to the local terrain of this gently undulating Wexford landscape. The enclosure has not escaped entirely unscathed; a road running east to west clips its southern edge, slightly truncating the surviving outline and marking one of the small, unremarkable ways in which modern infrastructure quietly overwrites older patterns of land use.