No earthwork rises above the surface, no stone marks the spot. What gives them away is a subtle difference in how crops grow, the kind of faint discolouration that only becomes legible from the air, or more precisely, from a satellite image taken on a specific July afternoon in 2018.

The two features were first identified by Simon Dowling from Google Earth imagery. One is an oval ecclesiastical enclosure, the curved ditch or fosse of which traces a path west, north-east, and south-south-west around a known church site in the area. The other, appended to the south-east of that enclosure, appears to be a bivallate rath, meaning a ringfort defined by two concentric ditches rather than one. A rath is an early medieval farmstead enclosure, typically circular or oval, dug from the earth and heaped into a bank. The bivallate variety, with its doubled defences, is generally considered to indicate a site of some status. Here the cropmarks of two fosses curve north-east, east, and south-west around a D-shaped interior measuring roughly 32 metres by 10 metres, with an overall external extent of approximately 50 metres by 18 metres. Critically, the two ditches are not traceable inside the boundary of the ecclesiastical enclosure, suggesting the rath and the church enclosure share or abut that boundary rather than one simply overlying the other.

What makes this site particularly interesting is the relationship between the two enclosures. Early medieval Ireland saw a recurring pattern of secular and religious settlements in close proximity, sometimes sharing boundaries or evolving from one into the other over generations. Whether that is what happened at Ryland remains an open question. The evidence, for now, exists only as a pattern of stressed soil visible in a single satellite image, awaiting any future ground investigation that might confirm what the cropmarks suggest.