The rath at Bricketstown in County Wexford does none of that. On the ground, there is nothing obviously there at all. What survives is a ghost, visible only from the air, where the crop above a long-buried ditch grows just differently enough to betray the shape beneath.

The site is a ringfort, the most common type of early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century. A rath, as this type is known, would originally have consisted of a circular earthen bank, or rampart, surrounding an enclosed living area, with a fosse, meaning a ditch, cut into the ground outside it. The bank has long since been levelled at Bricketstown, but the fosse remains, filled in and invisible at surface level. In dry summers, when crops are under moisture stress, the deeper, looser soil of a filled ditch retains water better than the surrounding ground, and the plants above it grow fractionally taller and greener. Photographed from the air, that difference resolves into a cropmark, a faint circular line traced across an otherwise unremarkable field. The Bricketstown enclosure measures approximately thirty metres in diameter, placing it at the smaller end of the ringfort scale, consistent with a single-family farmstead rather than a higher-status multivallate enclosure.