In a field near Halfmiletown in County Kildare, five small enclosures exist as little more than shadows in a photograph. They are visible only as cropmarks, the faint discolouration that appears in aerial imagery when buried ditches or banks affect how crops grow above them, with vegetation drawing differently on soil that has been disturbed, filled, or compressed at some point in the deep past. No earthwork rises above the surface here; nothing announces itself to a person walking by.

The cropmarks, recorded on a Geological Survey of Ireland aerial photograph, suggest the outlines of five small enclosures, possibly ring-ditches, which are typically the buried remnants of circular monuments associated with burial or ritual in prehistoric Ireland. Ring-ditches often represent the eroded remains of burial mounds, the raised earth long since ploughed away but the surrounding ditch still faintly legible from the air. That interpretation is lent some weight by a cist burial discovered approximately 200 metres to the north-west. A cist is a small stone-lined grave, usually from the Bronze Age, in which a body or cremated remains were placed. The proximity of a confirmed prehistoric burial to these ambiguous enclosures is suggestive, though the relationship between them has not been formally established.