Near the townland of Cones in County Laois, aerial photography has revealed what appears to be a prehistoric or early medieval enclosure sitting in a valley bottom close to a river, surrounded by dense woodland. The site exists, at least on paper, because a camera mounted in an aircraft caught something in the landscape that human feet have not, as far as is known, subsequently confirmed.

Enclosures of this type are among the most common but least understood features of the Irish countryside. They typically appear as circular or roughly oval earthworks, sometimes the remnant of a ringfort (a farmstead enclosed by a bank and ditch, used roughly between 500 and 1200 AD), or occasionally something older. In this case, the record is unusually candid about its own limitations. The site was identified from a single aerial photograph but was never reached on the ground, the reason given being inaccessibility caused by tree-planting. Commercial forestry, which expanded considerably across the Irish midlands through the twentieth century, has a particular talent for swallowing features like this, pressing up against earthworks and making survey work impractical or simply impossible. The enclosure at Cones sits somewhere inside that problem, recorded but unexamined, its true character and date unknown.