At Battlemount in County Kildare, a circular enclosure lies effectively invisible at ground level, detectable only from the air. What gives it away is a cropmark, the faint but telling difference in how vegetation grows over buried features, in this case a fosse, or defensive ditch, that once defined the boundary of a roughly circular enclosure approximately 35 metres across at its widest point. No earthwork rises above the surface; the land has long since been ploughed flat or otherwise levelled, leaving the buried ditch to betray itself through the crops above it.

The enclosure was first recorded through aerial photography taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, and confirmed again in a later aerial photograph from 1989. Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, and while their precise function varies, many are understood to be the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that served as the basic unit of rural settlement throughout the early medieval period, roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Others may be of earlier prehistoric origin, or may have served ritual or funerary purposes. Without excavation it is difficult to say which category Battlemount falls into, and no such work appears to have been recorded here. The diameter of around 35 metres sits comfortably within the typical range for a small to medium ringfort, though that alone settles nothing.