At Knockawaddra in County Kerry, a sub-circular enclosure roughly 42 metres north to south and 37 metres east to west shows up with reasonable clarity on aerial photography, its single earthen bank tracing a shape in the landscape that would otherwise be almost impossible to read at field level. Walk the ground and you will find only fragments, the bank surviving most legibly on the western side, where it reaches 8.9 metres in width, while the interior sinks into a bowl-shaped depression, the kind of saucer profile that hints at considerable age without giving much else away.

The site sits at the base of a gentle slope, with the Sliabh Mis mountains visible to the south and south-west and the Stacks Mountains rising to the east, a position that suggests its original builders were attentive to the wider landscape around Tralee. It belongs to a class of earthen enclosures, essentially circular or near-circular areas defined by a bank rather than a ditch, whose origins and purposes vary considerably across prehistory in Ireland. According to research carried out by Michael Connolly as part of a doctoral thesis on prehistoric settlement in the Lee Valley area, submitted to University College Cork in 2008, the enclosure was more complete before land improvement works in the early 1990s reshaped the surrounding fields and erased much of its edge. An L-shaped hollow abutting the interior to the south and south-east also created practical problems; it filled with water in winter and after heavy rain, and the landowner had portions of it filled in with soil after 2000, a process that consumed part of the enclosure itself. There is no evidence of a ditch having accompanied the bank at any point, which is itself a distinguishing characteristic worth noting.

What survives today is readable mainly as a set of subtle landform changes, a depression here, a low rise there, the kind of site that rewards patience and a willingness to look across the ground at an angle rather than straight down at it. The aerial photograph from 1998 remains the clearest single record of its shape, a reminder that some places reveal themselves more honestly from above.