There is nothing to see at Ballysooghan. That is, precisely, what makes it interesting. Somewhere beneath an ordinary stretch of level pasture in County Kildare lies the ghost of a small circular enclosure, invisible to anyone standing in the field and detectable only from the air, where it appears as a cropmark, a faint ring pressed into the grass by the buried remains of a long-vanished structure beneath.

Cropmarks form when buried features, walls, ditches, or banks, alter the way moisture moves through the soil above them. In dry conditions especially, the vegetation growing over a filled-in ditch tends to stay greener longer, while crops over a buried wall may ripen or thin earlier. From altitude, these differences in colour and growth register as shapes, and Ireland's aerial surveys have revealed thousands of such features that would otherwise remain entirely unknown. The Ballysooghan enclosure was identified on a Geological Survey of Ireland aerial photograph, catalogued as GSI N 44-2. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common monument types in the Irish archaeological record, and may represent anything from a ringfort, a form of enclosed farmstead common from the early medieval period, to a much older prehistoric boundary. Without excavation, the date and function of this particular one remains open.