This roughly square enclosure, measuring about 55 metres from east to west, was first spotted as a cropmark on aerial photographs taken in July 1968 and 1971. The site consists of two defensive ditches, or fosses, forming a bivallate enclosure with squared sides and gently rounded corners; a classic hallmark of a moated site from Ireland’s medieval period.

The enclosure had already vanished from the landscape by the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1839, suggesting it was levelled sometime before then. Yet traces of its former presence lingered in the field boundaries. The 1839 map and its 1900 revision show a field boundary running northeast to southwest along the eastern edge of where the monument once stood, with a telling kink that curves outward to respect the old earthwork’s footprint.

Today, nothing remains visible at ground level of this once substantial fortification. Only through the careful examination of aerial photographs, where different crop growth patterns betray the buried ditches beneath, can we glimpse this lost piece of Kilkenny’s medieval landscape. The site was formally recorded by archaeologist Jean Farrelly and added to Ireland’s archaeological database in February 2022, ensuring this invisible monument won’t be forgotten.