This one in Gorteens, County Wexford, exists almost entirely as a ghost, readable only from the air. Where a ringfort once stood, the soil has quietly preserved its memory in the form of cropmarks, the faint differential in how plants grow above buried features, revealing the outline of an enclosure that has otherwise vanished from the surface of the land.

What aerial photographs have captured at Gorteens is a circular enclosure roughly 35 metres in diameter, defined by a single fosse, the ditch that would have been dug around the perimeter of such a settlement. A ringfort, or rath, was typically a farmstead of the early medieval period in Ireland, enclosed by one or more earthen banks and their accompanying ditches, and home to a family of some local standing. At Gorteens, a second set of photographs reveals something more: traces of an outer fosse bringing the full external diameter to approximately 70 metres. A double-ditched ringfort was a marker of greater status, the additional enclosure suggesting this was no ordinary farmstead. The site sits on a fairly level landscape, the kind of open ground that made such a layout practical to construct and, centuries later, easy to plough away without trace.