This one in Ballymoran, County Offaly, offers nothing at ground level at all. Walk the fields and you would see no trace of the enclosure that lies beneath them, yet from the air a different picture emerges entirely, one of a circular or sub-circular enclosure accompanied by the ghostly outlines of an associated field system pressed into the soil.

The site was identified through aerial photography, specifically a sequence of Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography images, referenced as CUCAP APH 77, 78, and 79, and corroborated by a separate Geological Survey of Ireland photograph, GSI N453/4. Aerial archaeology of this kind works by reading subtle variations in crop growth or soil colour, so-called cropmarks and soilmarks, which reveal buried features invisible from the ground. The field system surrounding the enclosure presents a small puzzle: the field boundaries appear almost too regular, too geometric, to be ancient, yet the enclosure itself shows up clearly on independent imagery, suggesting that whatever lies below may predate the tidy agricultural landscape now sitting over it. An enclosure in Irish archaeology typically refers to a roughly circular area defined by a bank, ditch, or combination of both, and such features are associated with a broad range of periods and uses, from prehistoric settlement to early medieval farmsteads.