A 1990 aerial photograph captured cropmarks, the subtle variations in crop colour and growth that appear above buried features during dry conditions, outlining a system of linear fosses, that is, ditches or earthen boundaries, arranged at an angle that cuts across the lines of the modern fields. The fact that the two systems do not align is itself telling: the land was once divided according to a logic entirely different from anything mapped or fenced in recent centuries.

The photograph, taken in May 1990 as part of a wider aerial survey, reveals not just the field system but a concentration of ring-ditches in the surrounding area. Ring-ditches are the ploughed-down remains of circular earthworks, often prehistoric burial monuments such as barrows, whose ditches survive as cropmarks long after any visible mound has been levelled by centuries of cultivation. Several have been recorded in the immediate vicinity of the Clintstown field system, with further examples to the north and south. The clustering of these features suggests this stretch of Kilkenny farmland was a significant and well-used landscape over a long period, though the precise date of the field system itself has not been determined from surface evidence alone. What the aerial record makes plain is that the present-day patchwork of fields is only the most recent layer in a much longer sequence of human organisation of this ground.