At Monktown in County Meath, what survives of this early medieval enclosure is visible not as an earthwork but as a cropmark, the differential growth of crops over buried features that betrays the presence of structures long since levelled. A circular area roughly fifty metres across in its outer extent appears on aerial imagery, its outline traced by two distinct signals: a negative cropmark where an earthen bank once stood, and a positive cropmark where a surrounding fosse, or defensive ditch, cut into the soil. Vegetation above a filled ditch tends to grow lusher, drawing on deeper moisture, while soil compacted by an old bank produces the opposite effect. Together these contrasts sketch a ghostly plan across an otherwise ordinary-looking field.

The enclosure sits on fairly level ground at the foot of a south-east-facing slope, a position that would have offered modest shelter and reasonable drainage. The inner area measures approximately twenty metres in diameter, a scale consistent with a single-family or small-community settlement of the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, when ringforts, also called raths, were the most common form of rural enclosure across Ireland. The earthen bank appears to have been between five and eight metres wide, and the external fosse around six metres across. No entrance is visible in the cropmark evidence. The site was first brought to attention by Jean Charles Caillére, and the cropmarks are most clearly resolved on aerial imagery captured in April 2019, with the enclosure remaining detectable on later imagery from 2020 and 2022.