A gentle rise, an unexpected hollow, and suddenly the trees give way to a grassy clearing that reveals itself to be not a natural feature at all but a deliberately shaped oval earthwork, roughly twenty metres from north to south and fourteen metres from east to west. What you are looking at is an enclosure, the kind of ancient enclosed space found across Ireland, typically defined by a raised bank and an outer ditch and used for purposes that varied widely, from settlement and livestock management to ritual activity. This one sits quietly within its plantation, easy to miss, easier still to misread as a simple depression in the ground.

The enclosure was recorded and described by Denis Power, with the survey uploaded in November 2013. The defining feature is a partially levelled scarped edge, that is, a bank formed by cutting into and piling up the earth to create a pronounced slope, which here runs to a width of around five and a half metres and survives to a height of just under a metre. Beyond that bank lies an external fosse, a ditch, whose total width reaches just over ten metres at its broadest point, though the base of the cut is considerably narrower. The earthwork is at its most legible along the south-east to north-west axis, where both the bank and ditch retain their form most clearly. Moving to the north-west to south-east line, the features become shallower and less distinct. To the east, the fosse has almost entirely disappeared, choked over time with tall grasses, nettles, and yellow flag iris, the bright-flowered wetland plant that tends to colonise damp, low-lying ground and is a reliable indicator of waterlogged or formerly disturbed soil.

The interior of the enclosure is not flat. The ground rises at the centre and slopes away gently to both east and west, which may reflect the remains of an interior feature, accumulated material, or simply the natural topography beneath. Visitors approaching through the plantation should expect the earthwork to reveal itself gradually rather than all at once. The scarped bank is clearest when light falls at a low angle, so early morning or late afternoon visits in spring or autumn, when the canopy is thinner, tend to make the contours easier to read. The eastern arc of the fosse, where it is most heavily infilled, is worth examining closely in summer when the yellow flag iris is in flower, since its distribution maps almost exactly to where the ditch once ran.