The enclosure itself is invisible at ground level; it survives only as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly imprint that parched or waterlogged soil leaves on growing crops when the buried remains of a ditch, or fosse, alter the rate at which plants above it ripen. From the air, that difference in colour and height reads as a distinct ring roughly forty metres across.

The enclosure was identified on an aerial photograph taken on 16 July 1971, part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography. The same photograph also revealed a series of linear ditches nearby, tentatively interpreted as the remains of a related field system. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, and a fosse, which is essentially a defensive or boundary ditch, often accompanied a raised interior bank, though no such bank is recorded here. What the enclosure was used for, and when, remains open: it could relate to a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, or it could belong to an altogether different period. The farm roadway that now bisects its northern arc follows an older field boundary, which means the land has been in continuous use long enough to gradually erase, at the surface at least, any trace of what once stood here.