At Ballinamona in County Tipperary, a roughly circular enclosure lies beneath improved pasture on a south-facing slope, its outline erased at ground level but briefly legible from altitude. There is nothing to see if you stand there. The field looks like any other field.

The enclosure was identified from an aerial photograph taken in April 1974, when crop or soil patterns caught by the camera revealed a shape that centuries of farming had otherwise smoothed away. Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, most often the remains of a rath or ringfort, an enclosed farmstead typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They were built as raised earthen banks surrounding a family's dwelling and outbuildings, functioning as a boundary against livestock straying and perhaps offering a degree of security. Over generations, many were levelled by ploughing or land improvement, leaving only a faint differential in soil composition or moisture retention that, under the right conditions, shows up from above as a crop mark or soil mark. Whether that is the origin of this particular enclosure, the available evidence does not confirm, and no excavation record accompanies the aerial identification.