These were the enclosed farmsteads of rural Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and tens of thousands once dotted the landscape. Most have been ploughed flat or built over. This one survives, unevenly, in pastureland at Newpark, its banks and ditches still readable if you know what to look for.

The enclosure is oval in plan, measuring roughly 21 metres on its northeast-southwest axis and 25 metres across. It is defined by an inner bank, best preserved along the northwest-to-northeast arc where it still stands to an external height of around 1.7 metres, though elsewhere it has been levelled. Outside the bank runs a fosse, the drainage and defensive ditch that was dug to throw up material for the bank itself, and beyond that an outer bank, most of which survives only as a low, broad swell in the ground. One stretch of that outer bank continues northward in a sinuous linear formation, snaking away from the main enclosure in a direction roughly north-northwest to south-southeast, its purpose now unclear. The entrance, a gap about six metres wide, faces east-southeast and shows traces of a causeway across the fosse, the kind of raised crossing that would have allowed animals and carts to pass in and out. About four metres to the east-southeast of the main enclosure sits a roughly circular depression, some six metres across, whose origin is uncertain. Ancient quarrying and natural rock outcrops are visible in the surrounding field, suggesting the area was worked as well as settled long before anything written records the fact.