Somewhere beneath the farmland of Morristownbiller, a ghost of an early medieval settlement shows itself only from the air. What appears on the ground as ordinary tillage resolves, when viewed from altitude, into a roughly oval enclosure approximately forty metres across at its widest point, with traces of what may be an associated field system extending nearby. This kind of feature is known as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried archaeological features subtly affect the growth rate or colour of crops above them, making patterns invisible at ground level suddenly legible from above.

Ringforts, which are the most common monument type in the Irish landscape, were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. They usually consist of a circular or oval area bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches, within which a family and their livestock would have lived and worked. Many thousands survive as earthworks across Ireland, but a significant number have been levelled by ploughing over the centuries and survive only as these faint subsurface traces. The Morristownbiller example was identified from Google Earth aerial photography, with the key image captured on 28 June 2018. The detail of a possible associated field system alongside the enclosure adds some interest, hinting at a more complete agricultural landscape that once surrounded it.