On a northwest-facing slope in Toor, County Waterford, a roughly circular patch of scrub sits quietly on a natural shelf in the hillside. It would be easy to dismiss it as a quirk of the terrain, but the shape is too deliberate for that: an embanked enclosure, its outline already old enough to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, and almost certainly older still by a considerable margin.

The enclosure is subcircular in plan, measuring approximately 31 metres east to west and 27 metres north to south, set within what the earlier mapping recorded as a roughly 40-metre external diameter. Its edges are defined by a scarp, a low stepped drop in the ground surface, running from the southwest around to the northeast on the downslope side, standing between 0.6 and 1 metre high. On the remaining sides, a gentler scarp drops inward toward the interior, reaching a maximum height of about 0.6 metres. A field bank follows the line from the southwest to the north-northeast, further marking the boundary. The whole thing sits on a shelf above two watercourses: a stream running roughly south to north lies about 80 metres to the west, and a second stream running east to west passes some 230 metres to the north. This relationship with water is common among early enclosures in Ireland, where proximity to streams was both practical and, in some periods, carried ritual significance.

Embanked enclosures of this type are found across Ireland and can date from the prehistoric period through to the early medieval, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which. What survives at Toor is modest in scale but legible: the scarped edges, the scrub growth that now fills the interior, and the faint logic of the site's position on the slope all point to something deliberately made and deliberately placed.