Walking the lush pasture on its north-east-facing slope, a visitor would find no earthwork, no raised bank, no hollow in the ground. The enclosure exists, as far as anyone standing in that field is concerned, only as an absence.

What revealed it was a cropmark, the kind of faint signature that buried archaeology leaves in growing or recently cut vegetation. When soil has been disturbed or compacted by ancient ditches or walls, the plants above it respond differently to drought or cutting, and from the air those differences register as tonal variations in a field. A circular cropmark roughly thirty metres across appeared in a recently cut hay field here, captured in an aerial photograph taken in July 2005. The circular form suggests an enclosure of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, a defined space that may once have enclosed a homestead or held some other function now impossible to determine from the evidence alone. Two related sites lie within easy reach to the south-east, a ringfort and a second enclosure, at approximately 150 metres and 190 metres respectively, hinting that this corner of Tipperary was once rather more populated or organised than the quiet pasture now suggests.