At Farneybridge in County Tipperary, a cluster of earthworks spread across undulating pastureland went entirely unrecorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard reference for generations of fieldworkers. It took an aerial photograph taken in 1973 to reveal them: a circular enclosure, a rectangular enclosure, and a roughly rectangular form with an adjoining circular enclosure to the south-east, all gathered in the vicinity of a ringfort known as Ballyvesta Fort.

A ringfort, to give some context, is a circular enclosed settlement typically dating from the early medieval period, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. The enclosures at Farneybridge appear to cluster around Ballyvesta Fort in a way that hints at a shared history. The roughly rectangular enclosure to the south-east, measuring around 50 metres along its north-west to south-east axis, is defined at ground level by little more than a narrow trench or dip in the earth, roughly a metre wide, marked out by a slightly darker tone in the grass. The western portion of this enclosure was once formed by a field boundary that has since been levelled. Of the adjoining circular enclosure, there is now no trace whatsoever on the surface. The proximity of these features to the ringfort raises the possibility that they were in use at the same time, perhaps as associated field systems or enclosures for livestock, though no firm dating evidence is recorded.