Somewhere in County Kildare, in a townland carrying the unlikely name of Gotham, a field holds a secret that can only be read from the air. At ground level there is nothing to see; by 1972, whatever earthwork once marked this spot had been reduced to a barely perceptible rise in the grass. But viewed from above under the right conditions, the outline of an oval enclosure roughly 60 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west materialises as a cropmark, the differential growth of crops over buried features betraying a shape that centuries of ploughing could not entirely erase.

The enclosure appeared clearly enough on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, where it was drawn as a distinct oval feature. By the time the revised edition was published in 1909 it had softened to a raised oval area, already losing definition. Cropmarks, which appear when buried archaeology causes the vegetation above it to grow differently, typically darker and lusher over ditches, shorter and paler over buried walls, were captured in aerial photographs taken by Dr Gillian Barrett in 1990 and 1991. Those images revealed something more significant than the enclosure alone: it sits within the south-eastern quadrant of a second, considerably larger enclosure nearby. The relationship between the two features, one nested within the other, suggests a complex history of enclosure and activity on this ground, though quite what that history involved remains unresolved. Enclosures of this type in Irish archaeology can serve many purposes, from ringfort settlements to ecclesiastical boundaries to stock enclosures, and without excavation the function of either feature here remains a matter of speculation.