But the gentle mound at Ballintemple preserves the outline of an ancient enclosure, its circular form still legible to those who know what they are looking at, even if the plough and the herd have done their best to flatten it into the general texture of farmland.

The monument was not identified on the ground at all, but from the air, spotted through aerial photography in September 2002. What the photographs revealed was a sub-circular earthwork roughly 18 metres north to south and 17 metres east to west. Enclosures of this kind, defined by an earthen bank and an outer fosse, the fosse being a ditch dug to provide material for the bank and to add a further barrier, are found widely across Ireland and are generally associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation the date of any individual example remains uncertain. At Ballintemple, the bank still survives with a width of nearly thirteen metres at its base, though it rises only about 0.75 metres above the exterior ground level. A significant stretch of the earthwork, roughly seven metres across the eastern quadrant, has disappeared entirely, its bank and fosse both gone. The western side appears to have been straightened at some point, perhaps when the field boundaries were reorganised. Cattle have eroded the bank along the southern arc, and the interior of the enclosure slopes away to the east. A shallow land drain runs just a few metres to the south-south-east, and another enclosure of the same general type sits around 84 metres further in the same direction, suggesting this small rise was once a more populated corner of the landscape than it appears today.