At Kilmore in County Kildare, a circular enclosure lies completely erased from the surface of the land, invisible to anyone walking across it. No earthwork survives, no raised bank, no dip or hollow to hint at what was once there. The only evidence of its existence comes from LiDAR imagery, a remote-sensing technology that uses laser pulses fired from aircraft to detect minute variations in ground level, capable of revealing features that centuries of farming and land reorganisation have otherwise wiped clean.

What the LiDAR data shows is a circular enclosure of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, where a ringfort or similar enclosed site would have defined the domestic space of a farming family or minor local lord. This particular example has been bisected by a field boundary established after 1700, meaning that at some point following that date the enclosure was deliberately levelled or simply allowed to erode as agricultural improvement reshaped the landscape around it. To the north, the imagery also picks out a U-shaped feature in the surrounding landscape, the nature and relationship of which to the enclosure itself remains unclear. The site was identified through the LiDAR dataset held by Transport Infrastructure Ireland, which has proven useful in recent years for detecting precisely these kinds of lost or levelled monuments across the Irish countryside.