On low-lying land to the north-west of Eskerstephen graveyard in north Galway, there is an enclosure that exists, in any meaningful sense, only as a photograph taken from the air more than half a century ago. Stand on the spot today and you would find nothing to suggest that anything of significance ever occupied the ground beneath your feet.

In July 1968, aerial reconnaissance captured what is known as a vegetation mark, a phenomenon in which buried structures or earthworks cause subtle differences in how grass or crops grow above them, differences invisible at ground level but legible from the air. The image, catalogued as CUCAP AVM 44, showed two strongly curving concentric lines. These may represent the remains of a large enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that in early medieval Ireland often defined a settlement, a monastery, or a high-status farmstead. Alternatively, they could form part of an older field system. Either way, the proximity to Eskerstephen graveyard is suggestive; early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland were frequently surrounded by a curvilinear enclosure, a cashel or rath-like boundary that marked out the sacred ground, and graveyards often preserve the footprint of such enclosures long after every other physical element has disappeared. No visible surface trace survives at Templemoyle, which means the relationship between the two sites, and the true nature of what those concentric curves once described, remains an open question.