On a conifer-forested hilltop in County Kildare, there is a monument that has effectively ceased to exist above ground, yet its peculiarities survive in the historical record long after the earthwork itself was swallowed by trees and time. What once rose visibly on this high point is now invisible at ground level, classified only tentatively as a ringbarrow, a type of circular burial mound surrounded by a ditch and bank, typically dating to the Bronze Age.

What made this monument unusual, even when it could still be seen, was its inverted logic. Writing in 1906, Fitzgerald recorded it as a small rath, considerably damaged on its south-eastern side, and noted something genuinely odd about its construction: it had one encircling parapet, with the fosse, strange to say, inside, moat fashion. A fosse is simply a ditch, and the conventional arrangement places it on the outside of a bank or wall, making the interior harder to access or attack. Here, the ditch ran on the inside, which is precisely backwards from the defensive norm and points more towards a ceremonial or funerary function than any military one. The monument sat in an area known as the Long Stone Field on Mr. Leonard's farm, a name that itself gestures towards antiquity, given that a standing stone still survives roughly 120 metres to the south-south-west. By 1955, the site was described as having a fosse with a low, broad external bank measuring approximately 32 metres in diameter, but even then the earthwork was in poor condition. At some point after that survey, the plantation of conifers on the hilltop completed what demolition had begun, and the monument disappeared from view entirely.