A circular cropmark, roughly fifteen metres across, showed up in the aerial photograph, its outline betrayed only by the way dry weather causes buried ditches to affect plant growth differently from the undisturbed soil around them. What the camera recorded was a ring-ditch, the filled-in remains of a circular trench that would originally have defined a low mound or enclosure, and which survives today as nothing more than a shadow in a cereal crop.

Ring-ditches of this kind are typically interpreted as the remnants of prehistoric burial monuments, the ditches that once surrounded round barrows or similar earthworks, long since levelled by centuries of ploughing. This one sits alongside a second, larger ring-ditch close by, the two forming a pair of related features in the same field. What makes the wider site more intriguing still is their proximity to a curved fosse, a term for a broad external ditch, which appears to mark the corner of a large rectilinear enclosure or field boundary. The combination suggests a landscape with a complex and layered history, one in which a substantial organised boundary and what may be funerary monuments from an earlier period ended up in the same corner of a Kilkenny townland, their relationship now readable only from the air.