In a tillage field near Nicholastown in County Kildare, a slight stony rise in the ground is just about all that remains visible of a site that local tradition has long regarded as a burial ground. It is the kind of feature that most people would walk past without a second thought, yet aerial photography has repeatedly drawn attention to what lies beneath the surface.

Series of aerial photographs taken in 1968, 1970, and 1990 revealed the site through soilmarks and cropmarks, the subtle differences in soil colour and crop growth that signal buried features to the trained eye. What they show is a small uncultivated area occupying the north-eastern corner of a larger rectangular enclosure, the enclosure itself measuring roughly 65 metres east to west and 45 metres north to south, and defined by the cropmark of a fosse, which is a defensive or boundary ditch dug into the earth. The field has since been levelled, erasing most of what little topographical evidence remained, yet the reputed burial site still registers as a faint stony mound at ground level, just enough to suggest something deliberate beneath the soil. Whether the enclosure and the burial ground are related, and what period either might belong to, remains unresolved, the site carrying its local reputation without the documentation to explain it.