On the ground near Castlemitchell in County Kildare, there is nothing obvious to see. No earthwork, no stone, no visible trace of anything ancient. Yet from the air, on a dry summer's day, the soil tells a different story. Beneath a farmer's field, the buried remains of a circular enclosure reveal themselves as a cropmark, the subtle difference in colour and growth that ripening grain shows above a filled-in ditch. This is how the site came to be known at all.

On 17 July 1991, Dr. Gillian Barrett spotted it during an aerial photographic survey. The resulting photograph, catalogued as GB91.EF.37, shows the cropmark of a roughly circular enclosure defined by a fosse, the term used for a ditch dug as a boundary or defensive feature. More striking still is what lies within: a small ring-ditch sitting in the interior of the larger enclosure. Ring-ditches of this kind are generally understood to be the ploughed-down remains of Bronze Age burial mounds, the circular trench that once surrounded a central mound now flattened to invisibility at field level but preserved as a shadow in the subsoil. The combination of an outer enclosing fosse and an internal ring-ditch suggests a layered history to this particular patch of Kildare earth, though the precise relationship between the two features, and their dates, remains a matter for further investigation.