In a field in County Wexford, still known locally as the Moat Field, a ringfort was bulldozed around 1970. The earthen mound, which stood roughly a metre and a half high and about ten metres across, had become overgrown with scrub, and it was removed. At ground level today, in ordinary pasture, there is no trace. The site would be entirely forgotten were it not for what the sky can still detect.

Aerial photographs taken in 2000 reveal something the grass conceals: a clear vegetation mark showing a double-ditched enclosure roughly sixty metres in external diameter, with an entrance gap through both rings on the south-western side. A rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, was typically a circular earthwork used as a farmstead and defended enclosure during the early medieval period, broadly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The site had already shifted considerably in the historical record before its destruction. The first Ordnance Survey map, produced in 1839, recorded it as a small rectangular feature, while by the 1924 edition it appeared as a circular mound of around twenty metres in diameter. The mound that was later cleared away was probably not the ringfort itself but a spoil heap, material thrown up during the original construction of those concentric ditches, which remain buried intact beneath the field.

What is left here, then, is a site that exists almost entirely in inference: in old maps, in aerial photography, and in a field name that has quietly preserved the memory of a monument through a century of agricultural change.