On a steep north-east-facing slope at Kilkeany in County Waterford, a low grass-covered ring sits in the landscape doing its best to look like nothing in particular. The casual eye might read it as a slight irregularity in the field, a gentle rise and fall of ground, but the geometry is deliberate. What survives is a subcircular enclosure measuring roughly 34 metres north to south and 32 metres east to west, the remnant of something that was once considerably more defined.

When the Ordnance Survey mapped this part of Waterford in 1840, the feature was recorded as a circular embanked enclosure with an external diameter of around 45 metres, suggesting that the ground has lost material over the intervening century and a half of farming. Enclosures of this kind, earthworks defined by a bank and a fosse, the fosse being a surrounding ditch dug to throw up the bank material, appear throughout Ireland and can range in date and function from early medieval ringforts to prehistoric ceremonial monuments. At Kilkeany, traces of the fosse survive to the east and south-east, between ten metres wide and a modest twenty to forty centimetres deep, while a berm, the flat shelf of ground between a fosse and the inner bank, can be traced from the south-east around to the west. Elsewhere on the downslope side, a low scarp of around forty centimetres marks what remains of the enclosing edge. A later east-west field bank bisects the whole thing, cutting directly across the interior and suggesting that whoever laid out the modern field boundaries either did not recognise what they were dealing with, or simply did not mind.