And yet the one recorded at Parks in County Kilkenny is visible at all only because of the way crops grow, or rather the way they grow differently, over buried soil disturbances. In dry summers, the moisture retained in filled ditches or disturbed ground causes the vegetation above to stay greener and grow taller than the surrounding crop, tracing the ghost of a structure that was levelled long ago. What appears in aerial photographs is not a wall or a bank but a shadow cast by something that once was.

The boundary itself runs roughly north to south along a low east-west ridge in rolling grassland, sitting immediately to the west of a recorded enclosure. Around eighty metres to the south-west lies a ring-ditch, a circular trench typically associated with prehistoric funerary or ritual activity, where a central burial mound has long since been ploughed flat, leaving only the surrounding ditch as a trace in the soil. The aerial photograph that first documented the cropmark at Parks was taken on 13 July 1966, part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, a body of work that captured enormous amounts of Irish archaeological evidence during low-level flights across the country in the mid-twentieth century. The clustering of features here, the field boundary, the enclosure, and the ring-ditch in such close proximity, suggests a landscape that was organised and used intensively over a long period, though precisely when, and by whom, the surviving record does not say.