There is nothing to see there now in the conventional sense, yet under the right conditions, the earth itself gives the site away, tracing the outline of a fosse, the defensive ditch that once ran around an enclosure of the kind widely associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, through patterns in growing crops that reveal buried features invisible at ground level.

The enclosure was documented as early as 1839, when the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded its southern half, alongside a quarry lying about a hundred metres to the east. By the time the map was revised at the turn of the twentieth century, the enclosure had already disappeared from the cartographic record. It was still physically present as late as 1960, when it was described as being defined by a bank, the low earthen boundary typical of these sites. Shortly afterwards, however, correspondence from October and November of that year indicates it was levelled as part of Land Project Works carried out under the Office of Public Works, the kind of agricultural improvement scheme that quietly erased a great many earthworks across Ireland during the mid-twentieth century. What the machinery left behind was the fosse alone, buried but intact enough to show up as a circular cropmark on aerial photography taken in July 1968, and still legible on satellite imagery captured in August 2015. Cropmarks form when soil disturbance from a buried ditch retains more moisture than the surrounding ground, causing vegetation above it to grow at a different rate, and so to appear as a distinct band of colour when seen from above.