The earthwork at Maglass is one of those features that the landscape has almost swallowed, its boundaries legible only from above, where the differential growth of grass over buried or disturbed soil betrays a shape that does not belong to the natural contours of the land.

Circular earthworks of this kind are a familiar, if still incompletely understood, presence across the Irish countryside. They range from the elaborately banked ringforts that once served as enclosed farmsteads in the early medieval period to earlier ceremonial or funerary enclosures whose purposes are harder to pin down. A diameter of around twenty metres places Maglass towards the smaller end of the ringfort spectrum, though without excavation it would be premature to assign it confidently to any particular type or period. What the satellite images confirm is the outline; what lies beneath, or what activity the enclosure once contained, remains an open question.