On the eastern foothills of the Comeragh Mountains in County Waterford, there is an enclosure that nobody walking the land would ever see. It exists, as far as ground-level observers are concerned, not at all; only when seen from the air does it resolve into something coherent, a roughly circular form about forty metres across, traced out in subtly differentiated grass.

The site at Kilclooney was identified through aerial photography, which recorded a broad cropmark or soilmark feature describing the enclosure's circuit in the fields below. This technique, widely used in Irish archaeology, works because buried features, whether ditches, banks, or walls that have long since flattened into the earth, affect the growth and colour of the grass or crops above them. A filled-in ditch, for instance, retains more moisture than the surrounding soil and produces a slightly lusher or differently toned strip of vegetation, invisible from the ground but legible from altitude. The enclosure at Kilclooney is of this kind. Its diameter of approximately forty metres is consistent with the range of enclosed settlements found across early medieval Ireland, though without excavation the precise date and function of the site remain unknown.