On the western slope of Carrigadoon Hill in County Tipperary, somewhere beneath an ordinary field of pasture, lies an enclosure that cannot be seen by anyone standing on the ground above it. No earthwork breaks the surface, no ridge or hollow betrays its presence. It is, to all outward appearances, simply a hillside.

The enclosure, one of two conjoined examples sitting on a natural terrace partway up the gradual slope, was identified not by fieldwork but by aerial photography. The image in question, taken by the Air Corps and catalogued as V. 312/3077/6, captured what ground-level survey could not. Cropmarks and soilmarks, the subtle variations in plant growth or soil colour that appear from altitude when buried features influence the earth above them, can reveal the outlines of ancient enclosures, field systems, and settlements that have long since been ploughed flat or simply sunk below the turf. An enclosure of this kind would typically have functioned in early medieval Ireland as a defined space around a settlement or farmstead, bounded by a bank, ditch, or fence, though here nothing of that boundary survives above the surface. The two enclosures at Rathclarish are conjoined, meaning they share or abut a boundary, a configuration sometimes associated with a principal and subsidiary space within the same agricultural or domestic complex.