Somewhere beneath a ploughed field in Barkersford, County Kildare, lies a circular enclosure that has not been visible at ground level for a very long time. The only way to see it now is from above, and even then only under the right conditions: a dry summer, when the soil moisture difference between disturbed and undisturbed ground causes the crops overhead to grow unevenly, tracing out the buried ditches in faint stripes of colour. What appears on aerial imagery is a wide fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, curving around a roughly circular area with an estimated maximum diameter of about 90 metres. Narrower concentric fosses seem to run both inside and outside this main ditch, a layering that hints at something more elaborate than a simple farmstead enclosure.

The cropmarks also suggest a further fosse running from the south-east, around to the south, and on to the north-west, which may represent the remnants of an associated field system, the kind of organised agricultural layout that would have surrounded a settlement of some significance. A later field boundary, presumably post-medieval in origin, cuts across the north-eastern portion of the site, obscuring whatever lies beneath it and making a full assessment of the enclosure's shape impossible from surface evidence alone. Circular enclosures of this kind are found across Ireland in considerable numbers, and while their dates and functions vary, many are associated with the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when ringforts served as the primary form of enclosed rural settlement. The presence of multiple concentric ditches would, if confirmed, place this site among the more elaborate examples of that tradition.