It took a flight over east Galway in November 1987 to reveal them: a pair of contiguous enclosures sitting at the junction of three linear banks, their outlines barely legible as shallow earthworks in the undulating farmland below.

The eastern enclosure is roughly D-shaped in plan, about 21 metres across, formed by a low curving bank running from south through north to east, and a straight bank closing the form on the southern side, though that stretch is partly buried under rubble. Immediately to the north, the western enclosure, around 20 metres in diameter, appears to abut it, its boundary surviving as two low banks of earth and stone with a fosse between them, a fosse being a shallow ditch dug to reinforce the boundary, curving from the south-south-west around to the north. Beyond that arc, no surface trace remains. Enclosures of this kind are a common but imperfectly understood feature of the Irish countryside, thought in many cases to represent early medieval farmsteads, the earthen and stone rings once encircling a dwelling and its immediate yard. What makes Gortymadden quietly interesting is the pairing: two such enclosures set side by side, sharing a boundary, meeting at a point where older linear banks already crossed the ground, suggesting a landscape that was being used, divided, and reorganised over a long period before these particular features were built.