At Tullowbrin in County Kilkenny, what remains of an early medieval enclosure sits on the crest of a steep south-east-facing slope, commanding views in every direction across upland pasture. The circular enclosure would originally have measured around 35 metres in diameter, the kind of scale typical of a ringfort, which is the general term for a roughly circular enclosed settlement, usually of earth or stone, built and occupied across Ireland from roughly the early centuries AD through to the Norman period. What makes this example quietly striking is how selectively it has been erased.

Only the southern and western portions of the enclosure survive. A short, five-metre length of bank persists at the south-east, standing about 1.5 metres high and 3 metres wide. An external fosse, the defensive ditch that would have run around the outside of the bank, also survives on the south and west sides, reaching an internal depth of around 1.75 metres. To the north and east, the bank has been removed entirely, almost certainly by agricultural clearance over the centuries, and a later field bank now skirts the line of the old fosse. The interior, where a farmstead or small settlement once stood, is now flat and featureless. The contrast between what the southern arc still communicates and what the northern half has lost to farming pressure is a fairly legible record of how these sites gradually disappear from the landscape, one field improvement at a time.