The enclosure here is, to all practical purposes, gone at ground level, levelled by centuries of agricultural use. Yet on a satellite image captured in late June 2018, an oval cropmark ghosted into visibility, the buried remains of a bank and ditch quietly announcing themselves through the differential growth of grass above. This is the particular fascination of sites like this one: the archaeology has retreated below the surface, but it has not gone anywhere.

The enclosure was first recorded on the Ordnance Survey Ireland six-inch map of 1840, where it appeared as a sub-circular platform defined by a scarp. By the time the more detailed twenty-five inch edition was surveyed in 1897, the picture had grown a little clearer: the feature measured approximately 26 metres northwest to southeast and 29 metres northeast to southwest, with a bank running from the southeast around through the south and west to the northwest, and an external fosse, a defensive ditch, enclosing much of its perimeter. Even then, however, the monument had already been compromised. A field boundary running roughly north to south, erected sometime after 1700, had truncated the northeast to southern arc of the enclosure, slicing through it as later land divisions so often did with older features. By the time aerial orthophotography was compiled between 2005 and 2012, no surface remains were visible at all. The cropmark evidence, compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the record in April 2021, is now the clearest indication that anything was ever here.

The site sits in pasture in the northeast corner of a field, immediately west of a road running northeast to southwest and south of an access lane running east to west. Because there is nothing to see above ground, a visit here is more an exercise in reading landscape than in examining fabric. The Google Earth orthoimage from June 2018 is genuinely worth consulting before going; summer, when crop and grass growth is at its most differential, is when such cropmarks tend to show most clearly. Looking across the field on a dry summer morning, one might just make out a subtle variation in the tone of the pasture, a slight irregularity that the map evidence and the satellite record give meaning to.