Walking across the flat tillage fields near Courttown in County Kildare, there is nothing to see. No earthwork, no ridge in the soil, no stone out of place. Yet somewhere underfoot lies the ghost of a circular enclosure roughly fifty metres across, with a smaller companion enclosure, perhaps twenty metres in diameter, sitting off-centre within its northern interior. The only evidence for any of this comes from a single aerial photograph taken in 1973, in which subtle variations in crop growth, known as cropmarks, briefly betrayed the outline of buried ditches to anyone who knew what to look for.

Cropmarks form when buried features such as ditches or foundations affect how plants grow above them. Filled-in ditches tend to retain more moisture, producing lusher, taller crops, while buried walls or compacted surfaces do the opposite. From the air, and under the right conditions of drought or stress, these differences sketch out the plans of long-vanished structures with surprising clarity. The 1973 photograph captured a fosse, that is, a broad enclosing ditch, defining the circular area, with the smaller inner enclosure sitting asymmetrically to one side rather than at the centre. What this enclosure was used for, and when it was constructed, the photograph alone cannot say. What makes it more than an isolated curiosity is its company. This site is one of a notably dense cluster of levelled monuments identified across a roughly rectangular area of about 650 metres east to west and 350 metres north to south in the same townland, with further outlying examples detected up to 250 metres beyond the main group. The sheer number of vanished features crowded into this modest patch of Kildare farmland suggests a landscape of considerable former activity, now almost entirely erased at ground level.

Because no surface trace survives, there is nothing to visit in any conventional sense. The site exists now as a number in an archive and a faint smudge on a half-century-old photograph, which is, in its own way, its most interesting quality.