In the Woodlands area of Co. Kildare, there are traces of an ancient enclosure that exist today almost entirely as a memory recorded from the air. What makes this site quietly unsettling is not what survives on the ground but what does not: the enclosure, along with two neighbouring enclosures and a ring-ditch nearby, was obliterated by quarrying sometime between 2000 and 2005, leaving little or nothing of a cluster of monuments that had persisted, largely unnoticed, for centuries.

The enclosure first came to light in 1991, when Dr. Gillian Barrett identified it during an aerial photographic survey. Cropmarks, the faint discolouration that buried ditches and features can produce in growing crops when viewed from above, revealed the outline of a curvilinear enclosure defined by three fosses, or ditches. The enclosure was incomplete even as a cropmark, its circuit interrupted, and a modern field boundary cut across it from east to west. In the aerial photograph, the inner ditch could still be traced continuing northward as a cropmark into an adjacent arable field, though that ground too now appears to fall within the expanded limits of the quarry. Enclosures of this curvilinear type are commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, often surrounding a farmstead or a person of local status, though without excavation it is impossible to say more about who made this one or when.

What the aerial photograph preserves, then, is essentially the last coherent record of a monument that no longer exists in any meaningful physical form. The image reference GB91.DX.38 represents a window open for perhaps a decade before the quarry closed it permanently.