In a quiet valley in County Waterford, a shallow circular depression in the grass has been quietly accumulating local memory for generations. The site at Scartlea is known in the area as the location of a 'lois', an Irish term for an enclosure or pound associated with the corralling of animals, though the word carries older resonances and its precise meaning can shift depending on tradition and townland. What sits on the ground today is modest: a slightly dished grassy circle roughly 25 metres across, defined on the western and northern sides by a low fosse or berm, a shallow earthen bank and ditch, about 8 metres wide, and on the eastern and southern sides by a faint internal scarp.

When the Ordnance Survey produced its first 6-inch maps of Ireland in 1840, this feature was recorded as a circular enclosure with a diameter closer to 35 metres, suggesting the earthworks have diminished somewhat over the intervening centuries, whether through agricultural smoothing or simple weathering. The site sits on a gentle northeast-facing slope at the base of a west-to-east valley, a position that would have offered some shelter from prevailing weather. It does not stand alone in the landscape. Immediately to the south lie a rath, a type of circular earthen ringfort used as a defended farmstead in early medieval Ireland, and an associated souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage that typically served for storage or as a place of refuge. The clustering of these features suggests the area was an organised and inhabited place over a long period, with the enclosure perhaps functioning as part of the wider settlement rather than as an isolated curiosity.