No earthwork rises above the surrounding soil, no ditch catches the eye, no trace of stonework interrupts the grass. The only way to know it is there is to look down from above, at the right time of year, when differential growth in the crop overhead betrays the buried outline beneath.

What the aerial photographs reveal is a cropmark, the ghostly imprint left when ancient buried features, such as the filled-in ditches of a ringfort, affect the moisture retention of the soil above them and cause the overlying vegetation to grow at a slightly different rate or colour to the rest of the field. Ringforts, roughly circular enclosures typically defined by an earthen bank and outer ditch, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, dating broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They served as farmsteads, offering enclosure for livestock and a degree of protection for those living within. The example at Griffinstown appears, from Google Earth imagery taken on the 28th of June 2018, to form a circular enclosure of approximately sixteen metres in diameter, with what may be an entrance gap on the north-east by east side. At that scale, it would represent a relatively modest example of the type.