In a cereal field near Glasha in County Waterford, a circular area roughly 28 metres across betrays itself only through the faintest of clues: a broad ditch, or fosse, showing as slight traces along the north-east arc, and a low scarp no more than 0.7 metres high elsewhere around the perimeter. To the untrained eye it would read as nothing at all, a gentle irregularity in the crop, the kind of thing you would drive past without a second thought. Yet what it marks is an enclosure, almost certainly ancient, its original bank and ditch largely absorbed back into the earth over centuries of cultivation.

The site first appears clearly on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, recorded there as a circular embanked enclosure with an external diameter of around 35 metres. By the time the 1927 edition of the same map was produced, something had shifted in how the feature was being read: a small mound about 15 metres in diameter appears noted nearby, suggesting either that the earthwork had degraded considerably in the intervening decades, or that attention had moved to a related but distinct feature. Circular embanked enclosures of this kind are a familiar class of monument across Ireland, encompassing everything from ringforts, which served as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, to prehistoric ritual sites, and the distinction between types is not always easy to establish without excavation. The gradual shrinking of the recorded dimensions between 1840 and the later survey hints at ongoing erosion, perhaps accelerated by ploughing.