Somewhere beneath a cultivated field near Woodstock in County Kildare lies the ghost of an ancient enclosure, one that has never been excavated and exists, as far as the record goes, only as a shadow in the soil. It is visible not to the eye on the ground but from the air, where differences in crop growth betray the buried outline of a fosse, the ditch that once defined a roughly oval space measuring approximately 65 metres from northwest to southeast and 40 metres across at its widest. A fosse of this kind would typically have encircled a settlement, a farmstead, or perhaps a space of ritual significance, its soil compressed and disturbed in ways that cause crops above it to grow differently from those in undisturbed ground, producing what archaeologists call a cropmark.

The enclosure was first identified on an aerial photograph taken in 1971, part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography. A later photograph from 1989 not only confirmed the oval outline but suggested something additional: a possible smaller enclosure sitting adjacent to the northeast of the main one. Whether these two features were contemporary with one another, or represent different periods of activity on the same ground, is unknown. No excavation has been recorded, and the tillage that covers the site continues to obscure whatever archaeology remains beneath. The relationship between the two cropmarks is one of the more intriguing open questions the site presents, since paired or clustered enclosures of this kind are known elsewhere in Ireland and can indicate anything from animal penning to a secondary domestic or ritual space attached to a primary settlement.