The field is called the Forty Acres, the ground is largely level, and there is nothing to see, at least not from the surface. Yet overhead, in a 1972 aerial photograph, a perfect circle emerges from the crop, tracing the ghost of a double-ditched enclosure roughly thirty metres across. The archaeology is there; it has simply been pressed flat by centuries of agricultural use.

What the cropmark reveals is almost certainly a bivallate ringfort, meaning a roughly circular enclosure defined by two concentric earthen banks and ditches rather than one. Ringforts, which date broadly from the early medieval period through to around 1000 AD, were the most common form of rural settlement in early Ireland, typically used as enclosed farmsteads to protect people and livestock. The bivallate variety, with its doubled defences, suggests a settlement of some local importance. This particular example sits in the north-west corner of the Forty Acres, on a slight rise in otherwise open ground that falls away northward towards the Ballyboghill stream. The site was recorded by archaeologist Geraldine Stout and later updated by Christine Baker, with the record uploaded in November 2014.

For anyone curious enough to seek it out, the practical reality is that there is nothing to observe on the ground itself. The earthworks have been levelled entirely, and the site reads as ordinary farmland. The aerial cropmark referenced in the records, filed under FSI 588/7, remains the clearest evidence of what lies beneath. The circular outline was also visible on Bing satellite imagery as recently as 2013, and checking current aerial mapping platforms before a visit is probably the most rewarding approach. Cropmarks tend to appear most clearly during dry summers, when differential moisture in the soil causes the vegetation above buried features to grow at a different rate to the surrounding crop, making late summer the most likely time to see the pattern from above.