The site in question consists of three conjoined roughly square enclosures arranged on an east-west axis, their outlines preserved not in stone or earthwork but as cropmarks, the faint differential in how crops ripen over buried features that betrays what lies beneath a ploughed field. The enclosures step up in size from east to west, measuring approximately 25 metres, 40 metres, and 50 metres respectively, and a further cropmark traces an old field boundary cutting diagonally through them, running from the south-east edge through the centre of the two eastern enclosures and across the southern portion of the westernmost one.

The site was first identified on aerial photographs taken on 9 July 1964 and confirmed on a second set captured exactly five years later, on 9 July 1969, both taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography. What makes Rathclogh particularly interesting is not the three enclosures in isolation but what surrounds them. A separate enclosure sits roughly 40 metres to the west, and the aerial photographs reveal at least four further cropmark enclosures within 200 metres, arranged to the north, north-west, and north-east. Together they suggest a concentration of enclosed activity in this part of Kilkenny whose full character and date remain unresolved without excavation. Enclosures of this kind in Ireland are broadly associated with early medieval settlement and farming, where a roughly circular or rectilinear ditched boundary defined a farmstead or its associated paddocks, but the specific function and period of these examples has not been determined from surface evidence alone.