There is no earthwork to trace with your foot, no obvious rise or hollow to suggest that anything of significance lies beneath the grass. It was only through aerial photography that archaeologists first noticed something at all, a circular cropmark roughly fifteen metres across, the kind of subtle discolouration in a field that betrays a buried ditch, or fosse, beneath the surface.

Excavation eventually showed that the site is considerably more complex, and considerably older, than that first aerial glimpse suggested. Beneath the field lay a penannular enclosure dating to the 5th or 6th century, penannular meaning almost circular, with a deliberate break in its circumference rather than a fully closed ring. It measured around 26 metres in diameter. At some point during the 13th or 14th century, a larger enclosure was cut into the same ground, partly disrupting the earlier one. This later feature measured roughly 42 metres across and had an entrance facing south-east. The two phases together describe a place that was returned to, and reshaped, across something close to a thousand years. The earlier enclosure belongs to the early medieval period in Ireland, a time when such circular enclosed settlements, often associated with farmsteads or minor ecclesiastical sites, were common features of the landscape. The later, larger enclosure reflects the quite different organisational priorities of the Anglo-Norman period. That the two overlap physically is a small accident of geography with significant archaeological consequence, since the cutting of the later ditch damaged evidence for the earlier one.