An earthwork near Kiltoom, sitting on a natural terrace overlooking Lough Derravaragh, leaves no surface trace whatsoever, yet its circular outline appeared clearly in a Digital Globe aerial photograph taken in November 2011, rendered visible as a cropmark, the faint differential in how vegetation grows over buried or disturbed soil that allows archaeology to ghost back into view long after the physical structure has gone.

The site sits roughly 200 metres east of Lough Derravaragh, a long glacial lake in the midlands perhaps best known in Irish mythology as the place where the Children of Lir were condemned to spend centuries as swans. The earthwork itself has a more prosaic but still intriguing documentary history. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 depicts a circular enclosure at approximately this location, planted with trees, which suggests it was still a recognisable feature in the landscape at that point, even if already in decline. A second, levelled earthwork lies about 85 metres to the southwest, catalogued separately, and equally invisible on the ground today. Between the two, what was once a meaningful arrangement of enclosures on this hillside terrace has essentially been erased, surviving now only in cartographic records and the faint biological memory of the soil itself.