In a field on the western fringe of what was once the flood plain of the River Barrow, there is an enclosure that exists primarily as a ghost. It has never been excavated in any meaningful sense, never yielded finds, and is not visible to the naked eye at ground level. What is known about it comes almost entirely from a single aerial photograph taken in 1971, in which the outline of a fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, appears as a cropmark, the faint discolouration that buried features can produce in overlying vegetation when seen from above. The shape it traces is a large oval, estimated at roughly sixty metres across at its widest point.

Cropmark enclosures of this general type are scattered across the Irish midlands and are often associated with early medieval or prehistoric settlement, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say more than that. This particular site sits in pasture, and its underlying archaeology remains almost entirely unknown. In 1994, a sewage pipe trench was cut directly through the site, which might have offered some incidental insight. An archaeological inspection of the trench and its exposed profiles followed, but nothing turned up. No pottery, no bone, no structural material of any kind. The enclosure that announced itself so clearly from the air in 1971 left no trace at all when the ground was finally opened.