Somewhere beneath the fields of Stephenstown in County Kildare, two concentric ditches describe a pair of near-perfect circles in the earth. They are invisible at ground level, revealing themselves only as cropmarks, the kind of ghostly outlines that appear in aerial photographs when buried features cause the vegetation above them to grow differently. The inner circle measures roughly 40 metres in diameter, the outer roughly 80 metres, making them widely spaced relative to one another, which is itself a detail worth pausing over.

The enclosure first appears in the documentary record on Taylor's Map of County Kildare, published in 1783, where it is noted as a circular feature. Aerial photographs later confirmed the double-ditched structure, technically described as two concentric fosses, a foss being simply a ditch or trench. What the enclosure actually was remains an open question. The most straightforward interpretation would make it a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that proliferated across Ireland during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. But the spacing of the two ditches gives some reason for hesitation. This part of Kildare also contains a number of ringbarrows, which are circular earthworks associated with burial rather than habitation, typically defined by a bank and ditch enclosing a low central mound. Several have been recorded in the immediate area, and the possibility that Stephenstown's double enclosure belongs to that funerary tradition rather than the domestic one has not been ruled out. Without excavation, the ambiguity is likely to persist.