At Castlesize in County Kildare, a burial monument has gone largely unnoticed for who knows how long, invisible to anyone walking the land above it and detectable only from the air, and even then only under particular conditions. What revealed it was not an excavation or a survey on the ground, but a cropmark, the kind of ghostly outline that appears in aerial imagery when differential crop growth betrays something buried beneath the soil. In this case, a circular enclosure roughly seven metres in diameter showed up in Google Earth imagery captured in June 2018.

Cropmarks form when buried features such as ditches, pits, or walls affect how plants grow above them. Ditches filled with looser soil tend to retain more moisture, encouraging denser or taller growth, while buried stonework or compacted surfaces do the opposite. From ground level these variations are rarely perceptible, but from altitude, particularly during dry spells when the contrast is sharpest, the outlines of ancient structures can appear with surprising clarity. The feature at Castlesize belongs to the category of ditch barrow, a type of prehistoric funerary monument defined by a circular ditch, sometimes with an internal mound, that was used to mark or enclose a burial. At approximately seven metres across, this is a modest example, though size alone says little about the age or significance of what lies within. The site was identified from the satellite imagery by Chris Corlett and subsequently recorded in late 2018.