Others exist only as shadows in a field, visible for a matter of days each summer when the soil dries unevenly and the grass above a buried ditch turns a slightly different shade. The ring-ditch at Killuragh in north County Cork belongs to this second, quieter category. It survives not as a physical feature you could walk around, but as a cropmark, the faint circular outline of a fosse, or ditch, that showed up in an aerial photograph taken in July 1989. The enclosure it traces is modest, around ten metres in diameter, roughly the footprint of a large room.

Ring-ditches of this kind are found across Ireland and are generally interpreted as the ploughed-down remains of small circular monuments, sometimes Bronze Age burial mounds whose earthen banks have long since been flattened by centuries of agriculture. What survives underground is the ditch that once surrounded the mound, and it is that buried cut in the soil that creates the cropmark effect. Grass or grain rooted above the ditch, where the soil is deeper and retains more moisture, stays greener longer in dry weather, while the surrounding ground bleaches out. The 1989 photograph also recorded two linear cropmarks roughly twenty metres to the south-east of the enclosure, set at right angles to each other. Whether these represent field boundaries, a trackway, or something else entirely is not recorded, but their proximity to the ring-ditch gives the site a slightly more complex character than a single isolated feature.