Beneath a field in Aghanure, Co. Kildare, something unusual is buried: an enclosure whose shape does not quite follow the rules. Most ancient enclosed settlements in Ireland tend toward the circular or roughly oval, yet what lies here is angular, with straight sides to the north, east, and south, before the western end tapers away into a point, giving the whole outline a form that resists easy categorisation.

The site is known only through cropmarks, the faint but telling traces that buried archaeology leaves on the surface of growing crops. When soil fills a buried ditch, or fosse, it retains moisture differently from the undisturbed ground around it, and cereal crops above it grow fractionally taller or a different shade, visible from the air at the right season. Two aerial surveys, taken in 1970 and 1973 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, recorded exactly this at Aghanure. The overall enclosure measures roughly 70 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, substantial enough to suggest it was more than a simple farmstead boundary. More intriguing still, a second, smaller cropmark lies inside it, slightly to the east of centre, tracing a subrectangular outline that may represent a dwelling, a structure within a structure. A second levelled enclosure of similar character appears in the same aerial photographs a short distance to the northwest, suggesting this corner of Kildare was once rather more organised and occupied than its present open tillage would imply. No excavation is recorded here, so the date and precise function of the enclosure remain open questions, the pointed western terminus in particular having no obvious parallel that the available evidence can settle.