On the bank of the River Suir near Kilmeadan, Co. Waterford, a roughly rectangular earthwork stretches across the landscape for around 200 metres, yet the castle it once enclosed has vanished entirely from ground level. What survives is the outline, a kind of footprint in the land, and it takes photogrammetric modelling, the use of overlapping aerial photographs to reconstruct three-dimensional terrain, to reveal the internal subdivisions that hint at the complex of buildings that once stood here. The railway did not help matters: the Great Southern Fishguard-Rosslare line curves southward through this stretch and has clipped the south-western corner of the enclosure, erasing whatever lay there.

The manor of Kilmeadan has a long and transferable history. It belonged to John Fitzthomas Fitzgerald in 1282, passing into the hands of the Le Poer family by the early fourteenth century. John, son of Benedict le Poer, was styled Lord of Rathgormuck and Kilmeadan in 1328, and the family held that title well into the fifteenth century. By 1640, the Civil Survey records the manor as the property of John Power of Dunhill, and it was likely around this period, the early to mid-seventeenth century, that a large stone house was constructed on or near the site of the earlier castle. The earthwork that contains all of this history measures roughly 200 metres on its longer axis and 110 metres across, bounded to the south by Whelan's Bridge River, which meets the Suir at that point, and edged to the north by ground that the first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map describes as very rough, possibly waterlogged. Simon Dowling identified and reported the earthwork complex, and his photogrammetric models are what make the sub-divisions within the enclosure legible at all.