There is no mound, no stone, no obvious feature. The ring-ditch at Connahy announced itself only once, to a camera pointed downward from an aircraft on a July afternoon in 1971, when the soil's memory briefly showed through the growing crops.

A ring-ditch is the buried remnant of a circular trench, often all that survives of a prehistoric burial monument after centuries of ploughing have levelled whatever once stood above ground. The ditch itself, filled over time with soil of a slightly different composition to the surrounding ground, retains just enough moisture to feed the crops above it at a different rate. In dry summers, that difference registers as a cropmark, a faint discolouration readable from the air but otherwise imperceptible. The photograph that captured this one, taken as part of the Cambridge University Committee for Aerial Photography archive, shows a clean circular outline no more than ten metres at its widest. What the original monument looked like, and precisely when it was built, the ground has not yet given up. What is striking, though, is that this site does not stand alone. At least six other ring-ditches have been identified in the immediate vicinity, clustered along the same north to south ridge overlooking the Nore valley, suggesting that this stretch of Kilkenny's rolling interior was once a landscape of some ceremonial or funerary significance, its monuments now flattened to near-nothing and perceptible only under the right conditions of light, drought, and altitude.