At Rathskeagh in County Westmeath, the curving field fences lying to the west of a ruined church are what draw the attention of anyone looking carefully at the ground. That gentle arc, still readable in the modern field boundaries, may be the ghostly outline of an Early Christian ecclesiastical enclosure, the roughly circular or oval boundary that once defined a sacred precinct around a church and its associated buildings.

Ecclesiastical enclosures of this kind were a characteristic feature of early Irish Christianity, typically formed by a raised earthen bank or ditch encircling a monastic or church site. Over centuries of agricultural use, ploughing, and boundary-making, many such enclosures have been reduced to little more than a curve in the hedgerow or a slight rise in a field, their original form detectable only through careful survey work. The observation at Rathskeagh was noted by Leo Swan in 1988, whose systematic work on curvilinear features across Ireland helped establish the significance of these landscape traces. Whether the full enclosure survives in any substantial form beneath the surrounding fields is not clear from what has been recorded, but the alignment of the fences suggests the original boundary may once have been considerably more pronounced.