A site at Suttonsrath in County Kilkenny spent roughly sixteen years officially classified as a possible ancient enclosure, the kind of designation that implies earthworks, boundaries, perhaps the trace of a settlement or a ceremonised space. The classification came from an aerial photograph taken on 16 July 1971, in which something on the ground caught an interpreter's eye and suggested, from altitude, the geometry of a monument.

When someone finally walked the land in 1987, as part of the systematic fieldwork behind the Sites and Monuments Record, what they found was a small disused quarry, overgrown and unremarkable. Quarries of this kind are common across the Irish countryside, dug out for building stone, road material, or agricultural lime, and then abandoned once the useful material was exhausted or the need passed. Seen from the air, the disturbed ground and irregular edge of an old quarry can read uncannily like the cropmark or earthwork shadow of something older and more deliberate. The Suttonsrath site is a small lesson in how aerial photography, for all its power as a survey tool, can generate questions that only ground-level inspection can settle.