Measuring roughly twenty metres east to west and thirty metres north to south, it is the kind of site that only reveals itself under the right conditions: a low sun angle, a dry summer, the particular browning of grass over buried stonework or disturbed soil. This one came to light in an aerial photograph taken on the 19th of July 1971, part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography.

Within the enclosure, tucked into its south-eastern corner, are the traces of a rectangular structure, possibly the remains of a house. Rectilinear enclosures of this kind appear across the Irish landscape in varying periods, sometimes associated with early medieval settlement, sometimes with later farming activity. Without excavation it is difficult to assign a confident date, and the aerial record alone does not settle the question. What can be said is that someone, at some point, defined this patch of ground with enough deliberate effort to leave a mark that persisted for centuries beneath the surface of a Kilkenny field.

There is little here for the casual visitor in any conventional sense. The enclosure shows no obvious surface features, and its form is legible only in that single aerial image, taken more than fifty years ago on a July afternoon when the conditions briefly made the invisible visible.