A 1973 survey flight over Clonakenny, in County Tipperary, captured what appears to be a circular or D-shaped enclosure immediately to the south-west of the medieval church there, a faint outline that might otherwise pass entirely unnoticed at ground level. Whether it represents a distinct enclosure or simply the ghost of earlier land use is not settled, but its position, pressed close against a cluster of medieval structures, suggests it was once part of a deliberately organised landscape.

The interest lies partly in what surrounds it. The church at Clonakenny sits alongside a tower house and bawn, the bawn being a defensive enclosure of stone walls that typically surrounded an Irish tower house and its immediate yard, as well as a rectangular enclosure that together form a small but coherent medieval complex. Field banks survive to the south-west of the church, though they resist any neat interpretation and do not arrange themselves into an obvious or legible pattern. The reasoning behind treating the area as a possible field system is largely one of context: land lying this close to a medieval church, a rectangular enclosure, and a fortified tower house was almost certainly in active agricultural or domestic use, and some trace of that organisation would be expected to remain in the soil and earthworks. The aerial photograph from June 1973 is the clearest evidence for the enclosure itself, giving a view that ground-level survey alone would struggle to provide.