At the northern edge of the Little Curragh in County Kildare, a faint set of earthworks sits so quietly in the landscape that it takes a trained eye, or an aerial photograph, to read them properly. What survives is a roughly rectangular enclosure, measuring about 25.5 metres north to south and 16.5 metres across, defined by a low earthen bank and a shallow outer fosse, a narrow drainage or boundary ditch, that together barely rise or dip a few centimetres above and below the surrounding ground. The interior and eastern approaches are covered by broad, well-defined cultivation ridges, the corrugated traces of former tillage, which press right up against the enclosing bank.

Attached to the west is a larger rectangular field, roughly 70 metres by 35 metres, bounded by its own low earthen banks and by a substantial townland boundary bank running along its northern edge. That field carries narrower, less distinct ridges of its own. Taken together, the enclosure and the adjoining field are thought to represent a modest episode of land clearance at the margins of the Curragh, the great open limestone plain that dominates this part of Kildare, traditionally left as common grazing. The working theory is that someone, at some point difficult to date precisely, simply took in a small corner of that open ground and began to work it, throwing up a bank to mark the claim and turning the soil into ridges for crops.

The whole complex was identified from a Department of Defence aerial photograph taken in 1999, which is often the only way these nearly vanished earthworks declare themselves. On the ground, the banks stand no more than 20 centimetres above the interior, and the fosse is shallower still, making the site easy to overlook entirely in all but low, raking light.