Yet the ring-ditch at Ballymacoonoge in County Wexford is precisely the kind of site that reminds us how much of Ireland's ancient past lies just below the surface of ordinary-looking ground, waiting for the right technology to find it.

Ring-ditches are the ploughed-down or eroded remnants of prehistoric funerary or ceremonial monuments, most often the circular ditches that once surrounded a burial mound. The Ballymacoonoge example came to light not through excavation but through a magnetometer survey carried out in 2018 in advance of a planned quarry development. That geophysical work, published by Gimson and colleagues, revealed a circular enclosure roughly nine to nine and a half metres in diameter, with an entrance gap of about one and a half metres on the north-western side. Just to the south-west, there are hints of a second, larger possible enclosure approximately nineteen metres across, defined by a slight ditch and a second outer ditch running roughly two metres beyond it. Whether this outer feature represents a related monument or something entirely separate remains uncertain. When the surrounding area was tested archaeologically in 2019 by M. Carroll, and then monitored during topsoil removal across a further three and a half hectares in 2020, no related material turned up in either campaign. The ring-ditch and its possible companion have been set aside within a fallow area and preserved, while the quarry development proceeded around them.