At Ballycurrane in County Tipperary, a network of small, curving fields lies effectively invisible at ground level, buried within what is now gently undulating poor pasture. The fields show no definite trace to anyone walking the land, yet from above they resolve into a coherent pattern, a ghost of an earlier agricultural arrangement that has persisted in the soil long after the boundaries that once defined it were abandoned.

The system was captured in an Air Corps aerial photograph taken on 2 September 1959, which revealed the curving outlines of the small fields across the landscape. Sitting to the west of the field system is a rath, a type of circular earthwork enclosure used in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or settlement, typically defined by one or more banks and ditches. The proximity of the two features is suggestive; field systems associated with raths were a common feature of the early medieval Irish countryside, representing the managed agricultural land worked by the families who occupied these enclosed settlements. Whether this particular field system is contemporary with the rath cannot be confirmed from what survives, but the spatial relationship between the two is difficult to ignore.