No earthwork rises above the fields, no stones break the surface. What exists here is, in the most literal sense, invisible except from the air, and even then only under the right conditions. In the summer of 1996, a aerial photograph captured the site at a moment when differential crop growth betrayed what lay beneath: a complex of enclosures pressed into the soil, silent and largely undisturbed.

Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried ditches or banks influence how crops grow above them, often most legibly during a dry summer when stressed plants reveal the hidden geometry below. The photograph taken on 20 July 1996 shows a sub-circular enclosure defined by a fosse, which is simply a ditch dug as a boundary, with an entrance oriented to the south-west. Attached to it on the north is a rectangular enclosure, roughly 30 metres along its longer axis and 12 metres across, with its own entrance facing north-west. To the east, the sub-circular enclosure connects with a separate circular enclosure, and approximately five metres to the north-west sits a ring-ditch, a circular trench that in Irish archaeology is frequently associated with prehistoric funerary or ritual activity. What this cluster of forms represents in terms of date or function is not firmly established from the aerial evidence alone, but the combination of shapes, particularly the ring-ditch alongside enclosures of this type, suggests a landscape that was organised, and probably inhabited or ceremonially used, over a considerable span of time. The whole arrangement at Furzehouse is one of those places where the past has not so much disappeared as simply changed medium, trading stone and earth for the language of shadows in a summer crop.