At Drinan in north County Dublin, two circular enclosures cut into one another in the earth, their ditches marking out spaces that were in use during the early medieval period. One of those ditches yielded a decorated loop-headed pin and a zoomorphic penannular brooch, a type of clasp common in early medieval Ireland and Britain in which the ring is broken by a gap and terminated with animal-head ornaments. These are not the kinds of objects that turn up in ordinary field drains. Someone of consequence was connected to this place.

The site came to light not through deliberate excavation but through archaeological monitoring carried out under licence (03E1362ext) in advance of nearby development, the kind of watching brief that has saved countless sites from being lost unrecorded. What the monitoring revealed were two intercutting circular enclosures, the larger measuring 34 metres in diameter with a ditch 1.6 metres wide, the smaller 24 metres across. At the centre of the smaller enclosure lay extended burials orientated east to west, a burial pattern strongly associated with early Christian practice. Charcoal recovered from the ditches was radiocarbon dated, placing the smaller enclosure in use somewhere between AD 533 and 648, and the larger between AD 567 and 658, findings published by Moriarity in 2005. The two enclosures were not necessarily contemporary in their original construction, though they clearly share the same general period and overlap physically in the ground.

The monument is preserved within the open space of the Holywell housing estate in Drinan, which places it in an unusual category of archaeological survival, maintained not in a field or behind interpretive fencing but simply as green space within a residential development. There is no visitor centre and no formal signage to speak of, so approaching it requires a degree of local awareness. The enclosures are no longer visible as upstanding earthworks in the conventional sense, and what a visitor sees at ground level is largely a matter of knowing where to look and what the subtle topography might mean. For those with an interest in early medieval settlement and burial in the greater Dublin area, the significance lies less in any dramatic landscape feature and more in the knowledge of what the ground itself contains and what the objects recovered from it suggest about the people who once gathered here.