This one near Rathdowney in County Wexford exists, for the most part, only from the air. A circular enclosure roughly 35 metres across, it shows up not as a raised bank or visible ditch but as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly impression left in growing vegetation when buried features below the soil cause crops or grass above them to ripen or wither at slightly different rates. What the aerial photographs reveal is the outline of a slight fosse, the term for a defensive ditch, tracing a near-complete circle, with a deliberate gap on the eastern side that would once have served as an entrance.

The site belongs to the broad category of ringforts, known in the Irish tradition as raths, which were the typical enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, in use roughly from the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Thousands survive across the island in varying states of preservation; many others, like this one, have been almost entirely ploughed or worn away, leaving only the faintest subsoil traces. The level ground at Rathdowney offered no natural drama to protect the enclosure from agricultural change over the centuries, and what was once a functioning settlement boundary has been reduced to something legible only through the technology of aerial survey.