It has no stones, no mound, no visible trace whatsoever. The only reason we know it exists is a photograph taken from an aircraft on a July day in 1973, when the right combination of dry weather and growing crops threw its outline into relief as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly ring that appears in cereal fields when buried features affect how plants draw moisture and nutrients from the soil above them.

A ring-ditch of this kind is typically the last remnant of a prehistoric burial monument, most often a round barrow whose central mound has long since been ploughed away, leaving only the encircling ditch as a faint subsurface scar. The Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, which holds the 1973 image, captured the feature during a period when systematic aerial survey was still piecing together the extraordinary density of such buried archaeology across the Irish midlands and south-east. What makes the Clintstown example quietly interesting is its company: a circular enclosure of a different kind sits about 130 metres to the north-east. Whether the two features are contemporary or connected is not known, but their proximity in the same townland suggests this corner of Kilkenny was, at some point in prehistory, a place that mattered to someone.