What looks from ground level like an ordinary stretch of tillage in County Kildare conceals, just beneath the soil, the ghostly outlines of ancient structures that have not been visible to the human eye for centuries. They reveal themselves only from the air, and only under the right conditions, as cropmarks: faint differences in how grain or grass grows above buried features, where a filled-in ditch or the remains of a wall subtly alters the soil's moisture and chemistry. It is a phenomenon that turns a light aircraft into a time machine.

This particular enclosure is one of a remarkable cluster of such buried monuments concentrated around Courttown in County Kildare. Aerial surveys identified a dense grouping of cropmarks spread across a roughly rectangular area approximately 650 metres east to west and 350 metres across, lying in level tillage land, with further outlying sites scattered to the south and northwest. This specific enclosure was spotted in 1996 by Dr. Gillian Barrett during one of her dedicated aerial photographic surveys of the Irish landscape. The photograph in question, taken as part of that survey, shows the cropmark of a curvilinear enclosure, circular or oval in form, defined by a fosse, which is essentially a wide, flat-bottomed ditch dug around a settlement or ritual site for demarcation or defence. The enclosure appears incomplete in the image, whether because part of it was never built, or because the cropmark conditions on that day only partially revealed it, is not known. What is clear is that it forms part of a much larger archaeological landscape, one in which numerous levelled monuments of presumably different types and periods once stood close together, their physical presence long since erased at the surface but their buried footprints intact.