In a field in Newtownallen, County Kildare, the land holds the ghost of a structure that has largely ceased to exist above ground. What survives is detectable mainly from the air: cropmarks, the differential growth of grass and grain over buried soil disturbances, tracing the outline of what was once an approximately square enclosure, roughly 38 metres across on its north-south axis, surrounded by an earthen bank and an external fosse, a defensive ditch dug around the perimeter. On three sides that bank remains legible as a cropmark; on the south-west and south-east, its material seems to have been absorbed into the existing field boundaries, the old earthwork quietly cannibalised by later farming.

A description recorded in 1955 added some texture to what the aerial view alone could not confirm: traces of a slight inner bank were still visible at that point, along with causeways crossing at the south-east and north-west, and a small field appended to the western side. The aerial photograph that later brought the site into clearer focus identified it as a probable moated site, a category of enclosure typically associated with Anglo-Norman settlement in Ireland from the late twelfth century onward. Moated sites were generally the farmsteads of Anglo-Norman colonists or their tenants, defined by a rectangular or square bank and surrounding water-filled or dry ditch, offering a modest degree of defence and a clear demarcation of territory. The Kildare region was well within the medieval Pale, the area of most concentrated Anglo-Norman control, which makes the identification plausible, though not certain.