At Ardnagross in County Kildare, something buried under farmland became briefly legible from the sky on a summer's day in 2018. An aerial photograph taken on the 28th of June that year revealed two conjoined square-shaped enclosures as cropmarks, the kind of ghostly outlines that appear when buried features affect how crops grow above them, showing up as variations in colour and height that are invisible from ground level but readable from altitude.

The two enclosures sit side by side. The eastern one measures approximately 35 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west; its western neighbour is somewhat larger, roughly 43 metres by 48 metres. Running along the southern edge of both is a linear earthwork that may represent a field boundary. Taken together, the most straightforward interpretation is that these are the remains of two pre-1700 fields, remnants of an agricultural landscape that preceded the dramatic reorganisation of Irish land use in the early modern period. A more intriguing possibility, though unconfirmed, is that the pair could represent a conjoined moated site. Moated sites, which were enclosed farmsteads typically surrounded by a water-filled ditch, were common across Ireland and Britain between roughly the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, and were often associated with Anglo-Norman settlers or prosperous local landowners. Two adjoined examples would be unusual, which is partly what makes the identification uncertain and worth noting.

Nothing at ground level now marks what the aerial image hinted at. The site is known only through these cropmark outlines, visible on Google Earth and Digital Globe photography, and the features they represent remain unexcavated and unconfirmed. What lies beneath is a question the current fields have not yet answered.