The one at Priestsnewtown, on the southern fringes of Greystones in County Wicklow, is a good example of this quiet persistence. Roughly twelve metres in diameter and no more than twenty centimetres deep when excavated, it is the kind of feature that disappears entirely beneath ploughsoil or tarmac without anyone noticing, which is very nearly what happened here.

The ditch came to light during construction of the Greystones Southern Access Route, a road scheme that, like many infrastructure projects in Ireland during the early 2000s, triggered archaeological investigation before groundwork could proceed. Excavation of the southern half of the circuit revealed a ditch between one and one point three metres wide, but nothing inside it: no finds, no burial, no post-holes or pits that might indicate what the enclosure once held or marked. Ring-ditches of this kind are often associated with Bronze Age funerary monuments, the eroded remnants of round barrows whose mounded earth has long since been levelled, though the absence of any internal features here makes that interpretation impossible to confirm. About twenty-two metres to the east, excavators also uncovered a stone-lined hearth, a separate feature whose relationship to the ditch remains unclear. The northern half of the ring escaped the road-take and remains preserved in the ground, bisected now by the boundary between what was dug and what was left alone.