Stand in the field and the ground gives nothing away, no earthwork, no ridge, no hollow, just grass where silage was cut. And yet, from the air, two near-perfect circles emerge as dark crop marks against the lighter surrounding soil, the faint signature of ditches dug so long ago that the earth has swallowed them entirely. This is how ring-ditches tend to survive in the Irish landscape, not as monuments but as absences, readable only when the right crop at the right stage of growth betrays what lies beneath.

A ring-ditch is generally understood to be the buried remains of a circular ditch, often all that persists of a prehistoric burial mound or enclosure after centuries of ploughing and erosion have levelled any upstanding structure. The two examples at Clashatlea were identified through colour aerial photography, with the more easterly of the pair being slightly smaller; the larger measures approximately twelve metres in diameter, the smaller around ten. The site sits at the eastern end of the Sliabh Mis mountains in County Kerry, on ground that rises gently from north to south, with the Stacks Mountains visible to the north and the low-lying land around Castleisland opening out to the east. This landscape context was examined by Michael Connolly in his 2008 doctoral thesis on the prehistoric settlement of the Lee Valley, which placed sites like this within a broader pattern of early activity across the Tralee region. The positioning, with long sightlines in multiple directions, is the kind of detail that recurs with prehistoric funerary and ritual monuments, though what these particular circles once enclosed remains unknown.