In the summer of 1989, an aerial photograph taken in July captured the tell-tale marks of at least one small enclosure defined by a fosse, which is simply a ditch dug into the earth, often used to demarcate a settlement, a burial area, or a boundary of some kind. The enclosure itself is incomplete in the photograph, its circuit broken, but the cropmarks that reveal it are still legible enough to read.

Cropmarks form when buried features such as ditches or banks affect how plants grow above them. Soil that once filled a ditch tends to retain more moisture, producing lusher, taller crops directly overhead, while a buried wall or compacted surface does the opposite. Seen from above in dry summer conditions, these differences in vegetation create ghostly outlines of structures that may be thousands of years old. At Connahy, the 1989 photograph reveals not just one enclosure but a more complex arrangement: faint marks to the north-east suggest a second, curvilinear enclosure adjoining the first, with a small ring-ditch sitting within it. Ring-ditches are circular earthworks frequently associated with prehistoric burial, the remains of round barrows whose upstanding mounds have long since been ploughed flat. A further enclosure lies roughly one hundred metres to the north, and several additional ring-ditches and a field system have been identified in the immediate vicinity, all from cropmarks alone. The density of these features across a relatively small area suggests that this corner of Kilkenny was once a significantly organised and inhabited landscape, its boundaries and perhaps its dead carefully laid out across the ground.