In a field in Drinnanstown, County Kildare, something buried beneath the soil betrays itself only from the air. A single aerial photograph, catalogue reference GSI N440-39, captures what appears to be the cropmark of a mound, one of those faint discolourations in growing crops that form above buried features when soil depth or moisture differs fractionally from the surrounding ground. At ground level, there is nothing to see at all; no rise, no dip, no trace of any kind on the surface.

The site sits on a very gentle, north-facing slope given over to tillage. What makes the location particularly interesting is not just the invisibility of the monument itself, but the degree to which the landscape around it has also been erased. Field boundaries that appeared to the east and upslope to the north on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1910, the latest edition of that survey, have since been cleared away entirely. The mound, if it is a mound, now lies in an open, reworked agricultural field with none of its original field context surviving. What kind of mound it may have been, and from which period, the evidence does not say.